For one, even if I wanted to use it, piped never works for me.
Second, on mobile, my alternative of choice doesn’t recognize everyone’s non-yt links, so it removes my choice in the matter.
Third, I have no reason to trust the weird-ass domains I see, and to un-fuck the url takes much more time then just handing out the original YT links and letting people choose for themselves how they view the video.
Agree totally. Any YT link can be turned easily into an alternate frontend link, so leave it up to the clients to rewrite those. The now-defunct Tesseract Lemmy UI did that and let you select your own Piped/Invidious frontend.