Agreed, but this is a video based community, and unfortunately Peertube is not yet used enough to completely replace YouTube.

In the meantime, there are ways to avoid YouTube’s tracking, such as Freetube, Invidious instances, NewPipe, and Grayjay (grayjay is not GPL, but it is source available, and can sometimes work when the others are temporarily blocked by youtube and need to update a new solution).

Freetube videos cannot be linked to, it’s up to each individual to use manually on their end.

Invidious instances can be linked to, but unfortunately instances die fairly frequently, and links using them often die with them after a couple months or more, requiring the poster to search out new instances to replace them (having to comb through my old posts to replace the links with working ones eventually turned me off using it, I’m afraid).