Rather than just dis, could you be specific? It works for me, and I know a number of people who use it since they find it is better for them than the official client.
I've found it very flaky in the past. Half the time it can't load a video or it crashes while playing the video. I'd understand if some of the issues came from being throttled the way yt-dl does, but the Android user agent that my phone has (which is the workaround that yt-dlp uses right now to be unthrottled) should present unthrottled downloads. I have a better experience having a service running on my seedbox which downloads and serves a Youtube video than using Newpipe, which says something.
The app has been very stable for me for years now. It breaks every so often when YouTube changes its APIs, but the devs are quick to update it, so it rarely inconveniences me for long.
- Video playback breaks regularly and it takes 4-5 days for fixes to hit F-Droid. This is waaaay too slow.
- Random other stuff keeps breaking, not that the 100+ lines of recursive Java gibberish in the crash popups tell you what broke (but the crash reporter itself does break regularly, too)
- App structure is counterintuitive: You have tabs on the main screen, and the side bar... duplicates the tab buttons, but turns the tabs into overlays that disable search and other functions? What?
- Content discovery is a mess: I cannot search specific channels. I cannot sort results. I cannot access channel playlists. It's always faster to open a browser and use the youtube website for this, even on mobile.
- Content organization is a mess: I cannot sort anything, period. Nor can I filter (e.g. to filter out videos already watched, or filter for videos started but not finished, ...), or bookmark specific videos, or do anything else with the content.
- Speaking of already watched videos, tracking progress isn't reliable.
- A few updates ago, video playback was turned into a multi-stage procedure, and now I need 3+ clicks to exit a video that already finished playing. What?
- Video overlay UX is horrible. I don't even know what details to go into, nothing about it is intuitive and I ended up crashing Newpipe a few times just trying to exit it (or go back to regular view), and I gave up on ever trying to use it.
And so on and so forth. That's just off the top of my head.
NewPipe works if you're subscribed to a small amount of channels that update rarely, and you go watch each video when it comes out, so you don't lose track of what's where and what you watched, and don't mind the occasional youtube-free week. For anything else it breaks down quickly, and hard.
If you're, like me, subscribed to a dozen channels that have backlogs in the hundreds of videos to go through, it's a nightmare. I force myself to use it to minimize my exposure to YT's website/client, but I am not enjoying the experience and cannot in good conscience recommend it to anyone else.
I'll just note that you first issue, with updates being delayed by 4-5 days is a general F-Droid issue and not specific to NewPipe.
The delay exists, because F-Droid builds every application on their own server and that takes a while.
You could search for an alternative repo that just pulls the apk from github (maybe Izzydroid?), or host one yourself.
If you install their APK manually it can notify you when there's an update, and just a tap to download the new APK. There's also an offical newpipe repo you can add to f-droid.