This is so uninformative you would have been better off not saying anything at all.

according to some religious people i met

🥴

patriot act and seeing the continuation of right wing authoritarianism

The Patriot Act was an overwhelmingly bipartisan bill.

Why do people feel the need to split hairs with these terms?

He’s not splitting hairs. It’s just a different value proposition. I don’t like the phone number requirement either but it makes sense to your average normie who realizes SMS is exposed plaintext. Something like an anonymous seed phrase as the key to your account would confuse most people. Email would be an improvement but it’s at best pseudonymous.

I don’t know why anyone is using youtube directly when they can use Newpipe or Freetube. No ads, sponsorblock and even the ability to automatically skip intros, recaps etc On top of that no google account tracking or algorithms.

Edit: Adding “libretube” as well based on some of the replies to this comment.