Author of Piped here.

I think it is quite unlikely for YouTube to implement a DRM for watching videos. In anyways, we will keep fighting collaboratively as long as we can.

The most likely way YouTube probably will affect us currently is if they decide to log in wall their platform like how Twitter did.

Unfortunately, yes since for views to be counted, we have to make some tracking requests to YouTube.

Piped uses the Odysee sync API to find YouTube content already available there, and if so stream it from there. This is also written in the readme on the GitHub :)