For Android:
Newpipe or Tubular (Newpipe X Sponsorblock fork)
VueTube (still under development, the team is working slow because it's pretty small, they have a few time to spend on it and they need devs, it's a complete FOSS alternative to Vanced, and will have most of its features including optional Google log in with interactions)
If you need to login and have a full YouTube experience: Revancedapp
What about editing the comments? Do they keep any log of the original message and the subsequent edits or something? Maybe this would be a workaround to effectively delete them.
Knowing that any information you share publicly can be stolen, I think the way Lemmy's instances have the original comment after you deleted it could help counteract people manipulating what you said after you deleted it, such as making a quote and editing "your" original post after it was deleted. But this could give a lot of power to the admins as well, as they could be the ones manipulating.
For YouTube is extremely difficult, people are very used to it, and they are not moving to other platforms when there are decisions clearly against the users as they depend entirely on the creator's decision (and they will not earn as much money on other platforms... They are still "workers"), it is not as easy as leaving Twitter and Reddit for Mastodon and Lemmy since in this case their creators are the community of users themselves.
There is also the problem of needing a huge storage to save the videos, unfeasible for an open source/FOSS community project unless the rates of adoption are enormous enough and everyone contribute/donate, or at least until we start using more efficient codecs and video compression.
Users will pay as always.
I mean most of the mods used third party applications as tools to do their job. With the API changes, almost all third party apps will die, so all mods will lose their tools.
I'm not a mod and can't exactly understand the situation, but I guess third party apps had easier to use and better/more tools than what official Reddit gives them, so that's it.
Reddit is destroying their moderation tools anyway...
I tried it and I still prefer Newpipe, but it's cool to have a lot of alternatives for everyone!