Yep ! No-ads, no-sponsor, no-shit.
You even don't need to self-host, just disable piped proxy, enable local extraction, use HLS and a good VPN.
Sure it's not as anonymous and sometime I need to disable my VPN, but that's only temporarily, until they find a new loophole in youtoube's api.
That's not piped nor invidious backend's fault, just YouTube doing his cat and mouse thing...
Does it really make that of a difference? Sure I use SSD's for a long time now but haven't seen that much of a speed improvement over HDD's in games. Even with a m.2, haven't seen any improvement.
However data transfer speed is another story !