Those of us who degoogled see this as a pro not a con.
I'd also blame youtube, iirc there is no way to export your playlists to a .csv, which could then be imported to something like newpipe easily. Of course, youtube doesn't want to let you do that because the only thing keeping people from newpipe is really this "sunken cost" aspect to it.
I want to degoogle, but I also want to keep track of which videos I've watched already across devices. Maybe Newpipe and similar apps need a self-hosted server companion app. Or maybe a plugin for existing server software, like I dunno, Jellyfin or Nextcloud or something. Maybe using RSS? I'm just brainstorming here...
There are piped and invidious to do exactly this. You can host the server yourself or use a public instance. Subscriptions can be exported using google takeout and imported into piped when creating an account.
I don't know if the history can be imported too, but at least it keeps track of new history across devices.