I prefer Invidious for vague reasons, though either it or the instance I use most often seems to fail about 25--50% of the time on videos, with more popular content (e.g., music) failing most often, so I'll fall back to Piped.
Otherwise I use mpv / ytdl, and in fact greatly prefer that approach.
For those prefering a standalone GUI, there's VLC.
I also quite enjoy the mpv/yt-dl(p) setup, and I often pair it with ytfzf[1] to ease the search part.
FreeTube[2] is also a nicely done desktop frontend, capable of proxying requests through invidious.
Search is the one thing that mpv & yt-dlp don't handle. The now-moribund mps-youtube did offer search and curation and remains hands down the best interface to that service I've ever used. (It was throttled by API limits, I strongly suspect intentionally by Google.)
I've started seeing some CLI youtube search front-ends, though I've yet to try them. Thanks for mentioning ytfzf, as I'm not sure that's popped up for me before.
I prefer Invidious for vague reasons, though either it or the instance I use most often seems to fail about 25--50% of the time on videos, with more popular content (e.g., music) failing most often, so I'll fall back to Piped.
Otherwise I use mpv / ytdl, and in fact greatly prefer that approach.
For those prefering a standalone GUI, there's VLC.