I use Firefox and the uBlock Origin addon as my default browser setup. It works great..except for on youtube. I used to use it happily for youtube with all Ads blocked, but two recent youtube changes made me have to use a different browser and extension, just for youtube.
Firefox users started noticing degraded performance on youtube vs when they viewed youtube with Chrome.
uBlock Origin users in Chrome and Firefox appear to be being targeted
with an intermittent covert punishment of having any videos above 360p throttled so that they buffer heavily.
So my current approach, just for youtube, is Chrome with Clear Skies ad skipper extension which gets me good performance and no ads.
What is your setup for youtube without ads?
I'm also interested in youtube alternatives, especially for music.
Vanced simply applies some of the patches over youtube app if I understand currently(I have never used vanced myself), while newpipe is an app to use various video sources (such as youtube, soundcloud, media.ccc.de etc.) created entirely from scratch.
Yep NewPipe works with various video sources and Vanced is not youtube revanced, you can do a lot of things (called patches) to have a incredible youtube app.