Good to hear. Having a raspberry and kodi focused base with an open Linux backend sounds good. Will try that later.

There is sendtokodi, which uses yt-dlp. I’m a bit surprised that there are no newpipe-extractor clients for Kodi, since there should be hooks for everything you’d need. Then again, I don’t know how well it works outside of Android.

Depends on how far you want to go. From what I’ve been able to tell, they pedel a lot of flashy metrics and still had a bunch of google calls. Some of which you can manually remove, same as LOS. I would avoid buying into their cloud and keeping an eye on things yourself, if you want to install it. I saw them rebrand a bunch of OSS tooling as their own products back then. Don’t know if things changed since then, but I don’t trust the marketing.