In the old days (well, if you consider 2009 old, it's still yesterday in my view) there were 'alternative' sites you could plug a YouTube URL into and let it play so even if your browser were 'unsupported' (which wasn't always an Internet Explorer thing, it used to blacklist and block Netscape 9 because it wasn't Firefox to Google) you could get past that. At one point Metacafe was how I viewed YouTube videos that were either country-blocked, private, or blacklisted because they hated Windows 98 SE (I never liked Windows XP so I kept 98 SE going until the rise of SSL pretty much ended it)
Using DDG isn't any harder than Youtube, if you keep the 'video' tab bookmarked, and just search your video there and play it without having to leave the site. It's pretty instant, and it works also for other platforms if you're into the Tiktok or Facecrap.
I pretty much am forced to do it that way if using any Windows 7 machine because today's YouTube is so full of code that even with 8GB of RAM, and a four-core i5 isn't even enough to have it load less than 10 minutes with the browser saying 'not responding' a few times before you can click anything.
It's only useable with an SSD-equipped system. I don't fully trust SSDs. "spinning rust" can always be made to work, while when an SSD dies, it dies for keeps. I will always trust spinning rust more. I got systems well over 30 years old that work fine with their original HDDs. I have already lost a couple of systems due to SSD failures. One is still in the 'dying' phase which means waiting two hours to boot Windows 10, and opening an app like email takes 30 minutes.
A good example of a 'failing' HDD being brought back. Try that with a dead SSD: