I was in that boat. But after a while I realized I could no longer in good conscience give Google any more money when they were pushing so many initiatives that went against my interests.
I used a VPN and pay $2 a month for it, which is an acceptable trade off for using it on my phone and spending my life worrying about things that impact me more
- Because I don't see ads with YouTube Premium
- Because I add things to my playlists
- Because I more often than not find interesting things to watch there
- Because I like using it on my phone or TV
There's a lot of reasons why someone would prefer the official apps over some third party app that might break every few months.