Play in background, including with screen off, and ability to download videos to watch on a plane.

"What other benefits does newpipe offer?"

The Javascript source code for Google's YouTube player and the YouTube website is obfuscated and/or minified

The Java or Kotlin source code for Newpipe is not

If one does not like something about Newpipe, one can change or remove it

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this: NewPipe is an Android app, and consuming YouTube on a mobile browser is a much worse experience.

Newpipe doesn't clutter the screen with constant recommendations. You can just subscribe to the channels you want, get updates when they release a new video and that's it. It's a much more focused experience than regular Youtube.

The UX is much better. It has convenient gestures to change brightness, volume and speed during tte video. The speed can range from 0.1× to 5×, not just 0.25× to 2×. You can download videos or play them in the background.

Newpipe is more pleasant than YouTube on FF Android with uBlock in my opinion. I often search find a video on YouTube, copy the share link into Newpipe and watch there.

Personally, I use it for a chronological feed of my subscriptions. It takes less time to find something worth watching, and it is easier to move on to do something else if there isn't anything worth watching.

Bookmarking or downloading interesting videos is also handy, since they aren't mixed in with my general bookmarks (in a web browser).

Newpipe is a good youtube downloader for android. Works well for me with this pipeline: Youtube music -> newpipe -> music speed changer, so that I can slow down and pitch shift then song when using it to transcribe or learn a song.

It can run in the background. I use it to listen to videos before I fall asleep. Ads would mess up this hard and keeping the screen on would be unnecessary use of energy and OLED.

For me, the main benefit over the browser are the progress tracking and playlists. You can do both with bookmarks in the browser, but it's much less convenient.

Not needing a google account to view most of the videos? Being sble to download those you have interest to watch later offline (in a plane for instance)? Being able to subsribe to channels without a google account?