But that is my point: downvoting the news will not keep people from using it; the people who will want to use it will find it anyway.
In any case, people still want to be aware about it, especially the people who disagree and downvoted it, so they should have upvoted instead, in order to have a proper discussion about the issue they supposedly care about.
Trying to bury it in downvotes to make it disappear from "Hot" does the exact opposite.
On accessing Youtube: I've been using FreeTube for years and it's great, it even has support for Sponsorblock, and your subscriptions are stored offline in the app, among other benefits. For the browser, there is also the Libredirect extension, which you can use to easily redirect to Piped or Invidious instances.
If you manage to get yt-dlp to work (btw check that you have the latest version), I've also used the "play with MPV" Firefox extension in the past.