Because this website is an echo chamber that hates big corporations and think the holy grail is to avoid having an online footprint by not using big apps, thus achieving “privacy”.

In reality they’re a minority of about 100:1.

I saw a video of someone teaching himself to like celery, and coerced my girlfriend to do the same - it works!

You literally just start by nibbling a bit every day and start eating more and more as you can handle it. She loves celery now, to the point where she just eats it raw as snacks.

Whether it’s worth the apparent torture is up to you. To be frank, picky eaters give me second hand embarrassment when out dining, since you can teach yourself to like basically everything. Usually it’s just people who didn’t get much variety as children.

It’s not trying to piss you off, it’s trying to make money, as it should. Do you have any idea how much money it costs to run the infrastructure behind YouTube? Neither do I, because it’s unfathomable.

I pay for YouTube Premium along with 5 friends. It’s $5 per month per person. Beats any streaming service by miles.

I do, however pirate all my movies (except for the occasional cinema visit) and TV shows.

There are lots of privacy oriented Android flavors out there. Most of them won’t come with Google Play services installed. Any of them will be able to run any apps you need.

In my opinion, Google isn’t bad at all when it comes to tracking and bloatware. They’re much like Apple. It’s the branded phones like Samsung that are absolutely horrible.

Anyway, check out the LineageOS Wiki: https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/

It can give a quick overview of the devices which can easily install a custom ROM (OS). I heard good things about Fairphone