I’m not sure it’s the “best” way, but it’s a solid alternative, and receives rapid updates when YouTube moves to break things.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/15571129
I’m using this all the time myself. There is no login to YouTube required and it supports adding subscriptions and doing everything important you can do on YouTube.
And the best part is no ads whatsoever.
Syncthing is your friend. Freetube stores playlists, history, settings and subscriptions as .db-files which you can sync between devices. Android version also allows access to these files if enabled in settings.