I think this is absolutely doable to problem is you need to have enough users on all the time to make this sort of thing work soa doptionn is important. You could probably piggy back off existing open source projects to get it going.

And yet you can borrow anything from the local library for free and its considered totally fine and not pirating.

Google’s idea of privacy seems to always be we will protect your privacy by having all your data and making sure we are the only ones who can profit off of it. Its not that they care about privacy they care about them having exclusive rights to your data.

Freetube and newpipe for me. However I will say they just don’t work sometimes. So then I just am left with my browser.

It’s very hard to say. Based on your use case I would say either grapheneOS or calyxOS. I personally have a bit of a soft spot in my heart for CalyxOS but technically speaking graphene likely meets your usecase better.