Works well for me on Firefox with uBlock origin without any special lists.

Personally I use my own fork of FreeTube on desktops, though, falling back to Firefox with uBlock when there are outages.

Your experience is strange, I use the official Chrome (not Chromium) with uBlock Lite and everything works perfectly (except the 5s delay at the start).

Are you using a VPN? Youtube will be a jerk to those IPs. I need to set my exit node to either Poland or Albania to watch YT. (The latter incidentally is supposed to act as an ad-blocker due to local legislation banning some types of ads, but I have my own ad-blockers so I cannot confirm.)

Even on the fastest computer I got, I have to wait 2 whole minutes for the website to finish loading. I think they really hate Firefox.