Newpipe doesn’t have a version for iOS, the newpipe team decided it won’t support the os because it heavily relies on android api. Not to mention that you probably couldn’t easily install it even if it exists. Youtube without ads is available via safari though.

Nothing wrong with differences. I just wanted to point out that many of the things i thought i would be missing, i’m not, either because there is an alternative or because it’s in the os by default.

To answer your last question, an example, i paid more money to get less enjoyment from one of the computers i use in the “home lab”. I could’ve spun up yet another VM for some services, for free, but i decided to purchase a dedicated machine. It had to be small tho, so the only real option i had was the Intel NUC.

It costs triple of the DIY version, not to mention infinitely more than a “free” VM, but it was the right choice. CPU is soldered, you have to buy M.2 storage because no sata ports, and it takes SO-DIMM. I “could” buy a cheap AMD CPU and motherboard and reuse multiple sticks of RAM and SSDs laying around in the lab, but the power consumption and form factor were more important for the use case.