I'm afraid a PWA might be the only way to go. uYou, Cercube, and Yattee are the only apps that aren't crammed full of ads, tracking and in-app purchases.

just use safari. open a invidious instance and pin it to your homescreen.

There are some invidious instances using "googlevideo" javascript to directly fetch the videos locally. So you dont use their bandwidth as much.

If thats enough for you maybe that, or maybe add a VPN to it.

For playlists...

Not an alternative to NewPipe, but there’s a solid app in the App Store that’s basically been a functional, constantly updated clone of YT premium. It’s called Video Lite.

I am not very familiar with iOS but if everything goes wrong you could probably use Piped as a PWA, that's a website but one that uses caching very well and has support for Sponsorblock and Dearrow to get the optimal Youtube experience!