You could try https://piped.video or another piped instance
Ultra980
From how you've described modifying your distro, that's literally NixOS. Your entire config is declared in a git repo, when you update the system it rebuilds it from that repo. But you'll have to learn the nix language, and it's not a easy-to-use, beginner-friendly distro.
You should probably try Linux Mint, or if you have an NVIDIA card, Pop!_OS
It's time to switch to Linux!
Seems like a nice distro! Iwouldn't use it because I don't want to go back to a "regular" distro after using NixOS, but I'll definitely recommend it to friends. Too bad it doesn't have an RSS feed for the news...
For distributing software (nixpkgs is a flake and many projects have flakes), replacing channels (again, nixpkgs is a flake) or managing configs (check out my repo)
You should try revanced.