Yeah, I should have asked for more advice months ago, I thought I was doing pretty good, but now it seems like I have dug myself a little hole in a couple of ways 😅 hopefully I can get it straight without too much headache.
Discussion
We've all been there. I can't count the amount of times I've had to burn everything and start from scratch
You can switch between newpipe variants by exporting the database, that includes all settings, subscriptions and views.
There is also a fork of newpipe on the Izzy repo, that has Sponsorblock added, so it skips the ads inside of the video. But I'm not sure about privacy. It is querying the Sponsorblock server about the parts it needs to skip, so they know what videos you're watching.