Also, since back when I last looked for youtube alternatives, many that seemed good turned out to use things like NFT and the sort, I feel compelled to ask:
Does it use technologies such as that, or are its instances just plain usual self-hosted sites?
Yes, but it suffers the same problem the rest of the fediverse does: the lack of people.
If you are looking for an alternative to consume content, maybe odysee will be a better option.
Anyway, you can watch peertube using the newpipe app.
Exactly this. I don’t know what to do with a homepage that shows one new video per week in the federated feed. And many of those new videos are games I don’t know or Blender videos.