In addition to Piped, and Invidious, mentioned by sibling comments, which allow you to subscribe, search, and provide recommendations, you can use a complete CLI workflow with something like ytfzf[0], or, you can use the search commands on yt-dlp[1], which are also accessibly through mpv using the ytdl:// prefix.
Getting familiar with such tools not only replaces the terrible UXes you have to be subjected to, but also gives you the power and freedom to be creative with how you use Youtube and other online streaming sites.
I wrote various tiny scripts to replace all my needs for Youtube search, using any highlighted text, with a shortcut, Youtube Music, with a synced plain text file of song titles and a shuffle-on-read script, and more curiously, a script to help me slowly go through all thousands of my partner's favorite songs, and then, using shortcuts, add them to my own favorites, decide on them later, add them to the "what the heck do you listen to" friendly banter list, or the "my ears bleeding" list, etc. Much better UX then anything the slow web UIs can offer, and with minimum hacking.
It is less zram, and more block I/O scheduling congestion on Linux in general[1]. The machine thrashes and becomes unresponsive under memory pressure as I/O requests flood the disks, whether it is for swap, or unpaging and re-paging file-backed storage (open shared libraries, etc.), or simply evicting frequently accessed files from the file page cache.
I run my personal workstations and laptops without swap, and with earlyoom[2], which results in applications getting killed before the machine reaches unresponsive state. I can only afford that because I trust my tools (vim, emacs, firefox, but most likely firefox) would not lose my session if they shutdown unexpectedly. I turn earlyoom off when I play games where I know memory usage will grow suddenly, but the game won't reach the limits of my machine. You can also whitelist specific applications in earlyoom, if I recall correctly.
Some people claim success configuring the kernel to use different I/O schedulers, but I haven't tried that yet.
Arch focuses on fast packageing of the latest versions of existing applications, but leaves all but the most fundamental architectural decisions to the user. Fedora focuses on implemenring new experimental systems at the architectural level, integrating them with the distro, to make them, hopefully, easy to use out of the box.
You can embed videos from an Invidious instance instead; on a video's page[1] there's an "embed video" link[2] you can use. The instance can be one hosted by you if you don't trust public ones, and you probably want to enable proxying by default if you don't want your clients to stream the video directly from Google's servers. You can also use a browser extension like libredirect[3] to automatically replace YouTube embeds with Invidious ones while browsing the web.
Getting familiar with such tools not only replaces the terrible UXes you have to be subjected to, but also gives you the power and freedom to be creative with how you use Youtube and other online streaming sites.
I wrote various tiny scripts to replace all my needs for Youtube search, using any highlighted text, with a shortcut, Youtube Music, with a synced plain text file of song titles and a shuffle-on-read script, and more curiously, a script to help me slowly go through all thousands of my partner's favorite songs, and then, using shortcuts, add them to my own favorites, decide on them later, add them to the "what the heck do you listen to" friendly banter list, or the "my ears bleeding" list, etc. Much better UX then anything the slow web UIs can offer, and with minimum hacking.
[0]: https://ytfzf.github.io/
[1]: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp