I dont think newpipe would protect from this since it still contacts the yt servers to pull the video. Peertube or a VPN would stop this though.

I just found out that Lemmy is not allowing (or has rate-limited, or whatever) VPN connections to post or react.

Not a fan of that at all.

Could be your instance. World is behind cloudflare after all.

World and NordVPN. Recommend another instance?

Hmmm. Im on monero.town obviously and its not behind cloudflare, but i don’t have any specific recommendation. Easy way to tell if an instance is behind cf is to run a ping instance.tld from command line. If the average is like 20-40ms its likely cloudflare.