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?
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.