plenty of pointed discourse forums out there. I agree that the search engines may be the problem. You have to know where to look.

There are definitely some privacy benefits I imagine, as you are not directly utilizing a user account and the YouTube UI. Now if you are asking if it is still possible for google or YouTube to track you the answer is yes, you are just making it slightly harder.

Pretty sure yit is just an autocorrect of yt-dlp

Just self host invidious or use an invidious instance that is maintained? My self hosted one works just fine

Joplin & sync to my self-hosted Nextcloud (with many other sync options)