When I was in high school, the student council organised a demonstration for Victims of Domestic Violence Memorial Day, wherein observant students were not to speak aloud for the entire day. They were issued black pinback buttons so that teachers would, theoretically, know not to call on them; the idea being to spend an entire day in silence. One of J's friends, Vince, was taking part in the demonstration. Even though he was most likely doing it to impress girls, his motives aren't strictly relevant right now. At lunch period, he used a loophole in the rules to speak without speaking, through a combination of lip-reading and Charades. While he did not, technically, abrogate the rules, insofar as he never spoke audibly, he did undercut the demonstration's underlying principle.
At the time of writing, there is an ongoing boycott of YouTube, to protest Google's decision to use analytical AI to decide if a viewer is a minor or not, then requiring either a selfie where the subject is holding their government issued ID card or valid banking information in order to verify age. The boycott requires that participants not watch anything on YouTube for the duration. That having been said, and as you know from clicking around this website, there are several 3rd-party frontend options for YouTube (to wit, software that accesses the Google Video CDN directly, bypassing YouTube's tracking and analysis) which, under ordinary circumstances, would be used to watch YouTube videos without needing to deal with compulsory ad breaks and to obviate the typical trend analysis that the website's beacons and trackers would do on youtube.com itself.
I've seen people on Neocities and Tumblr declare their intent to continue accessing their playlists and watching their favourite channels on FreeTube or NewPipe instead of the YouTube app. Well, that's good, and if I may say, you should have been doing that this whole time. But, we arrive once again at Vince's solution. By accessing YouTube over a frontend rather than through the website itself, you may be following the letter of the boycott, but you have undercut the boycott's original intent. While the mental image of YouTube staff noticing a drop in website use while noting no concomitant drop in traffic requests and going "Huh, I guess we fucked up somewhere," is certainly fun, it's just not very realistic. Frontends are not very reliable because of YouTube's own actions to hobble direct CDN access from other referrers, and the "Watch on YouTube" link is omnipresent and quite tempting. In order to be fully effective, the boycott must cause all traffic requests from any referrer at all to drop, and this is not happening if you continue to watch Squirrels At The Window on NewPipe. The point is to make such a dramatic drop in access as to cause alarm at Google, not to follow the boycott to the letter while finding loopholes for continued access.
YouTube is still YouTube, no matter how you access it.