I think ts great! Sound quality is as good or better. Ive always discovered new music more from yt than Spotify personally so it has about 10+ years of my listening habits to go on and it dies a good job finding new stuff I like
While downloading is technically locked for free {even revanced) users ther are appa like newpipe or ytdlp that you can use to rip the audio in various formats. .
For organizing large collections and playlists I think both Spotify and YouTube are not really good but yt music on the desktop/webui is great where Spotify has a better interface for their mobile app. This might be more of a me problem though because I prefer organizing my collection offline using something like ex falso and musicbrains picard.
In terms of music library size they are pretty much equal, I used soundiiz ($5 service) to export and sync my library from spotify to yt and it got most everything, playlists included.
I think overall it might take some adjusting to if you're very used to Spotify and its UI but its a very suitable replacement.
I have a google TV device and I didn't even know they had a free option FROM google, but Pluto and tubi already have ads so not really surprising google would too... I just use jellyfin and smart tube, haven't seen ads in ages.
It is on f-droid too. This isnt being "unhinged" its just calling out google for their hypocrisy and pointless "privacy” policies and citing lots of examples.
However, I don't get why you would ever use Lidarr. Why would you ever download music using torrents? You can use tools like spotdl and yt-dlp to download songs from YouTube music and Spotify, it's faster and more reliable; I have had some issues finding torrents of music from less-known artists.
I make use of deezeloader, deemix and/or streamrip, which is what I use because unlock Spotify deezet, qobuz and tidal (supported by streamrjp) have true lossless flac audio available.
Lidar can be extended to work with them instead of torrents.
Using a live usb is the correct answer since compiling a custom initramfs would require one anyway and just add more steps... Not sure what gives you the impression using a liveusb is "more complicated" but its not.
If you really want to fight back check out the federated alternative FunkWhale