[greggyb]

It's not an all-or-nothing thing. For me, I watch YouTube in a dedicated Firefox Container (and everything else in either temporary containers or dedicated), so not much follows me around.

Figure out what you want, and then put together pieces that get you there.

[FabHK]

This. Or you can use DDG to search, then copy links you like and use youtube-dl to just download the video.

[codecamper]

that sounds good. I need to set up some scripts to do this & also sync into my phone.

[FabHK]

Yeah. BTW, on macOS, it would be trivial to hack together an Automator workflow that gives you a Service (ie, a menu item in Safari->Services) that says "Download Video", or "Add Youtube Song to Music", and does what it says.

Basically you'd use the "Get Current Webpage from Safari" block, then in the Terminal

  PATH="/usr/local/bin:${PATH}"
  cd Music/YTDownloads  
  # or wherever you want it
  youtube-dl -q -f 140 "${@%%&*}"  
  # format 140 is 128k .m4a

Then add to existing playlist in music. Ah, if only it were legal!

[codecamper]

yup. I just keep a terminal open set to that path. Had just 10Mbit wifi before but that is now 500Mbit. Will have to revisit this solution. Something like a rsync would be nice.