NewPipe not having essential features like the home tab (recommended videos) or My Mix make the app almost useless to me. Not supporting livestream chat or being able to watch member streams (or videos) is also another big deal breaker for me. NewPipe also can't show community posts or give me notifications when a creator uploads a video or makes a community post.
I keep the app installed as a quick way to watch videos in incognito mode.
NewPipe is specifically designed to be privacy first. This means no account, no client-side tracking, as few web requests as possible, and everything (e.g. watch history and subscriptions) is saved offline. Thus it is impossible to show non-generically recommended videos or to enable chat.
That depends on what we agree should be the minimum functionality. On computers with physical keyboards I have always searched YouTube and downloaded from the command line. No youtube-dl, no scripting languages, just a couple of tiny Bourne shell scripts. YouTbe has always made this very easy. The functionality I need is (a) search (b) retrieve textual video information and (c) retrieve video. The only domains required to do that, IME, are (1) www.youtube.com for (a) and (b), and (2) googlevideo.com subdomains for (c). It is possible to use these tiny scripts on an Android phone with Termux. It was surprising to see NewPipe, installed from F-Droid, trying to make requests to the following unnecessary domains:
NB. I block all these and the app still works fine.
I have never tried to use a YouTube app. Perhaps NewPipe is meant to be compared to a YouTube app not to use of the YouTube website. The scripts I write for YouTube are in response to the annoyances of using the YouTube website, including all the gratuitous requests to unnecessary domains.
"[A]s few web requests as possible" depends on what functionality the user wants. For example, if the user must have thumbnails then we must make requests to ytimg.com subdomains. Otherwise there is no need to make requests to ytimg.com subdomains. Because I only want to search, read JSON and download video, I do not need to make requests to the above domains that NewPipe tries to reach.
Without an account you lose the ability to support many useful features that YouTube offers. In my ideal FLOSS YouTube client I would prefer if it could at least support the main features of the proprietary client.
I keep the app installed as a quick way to watch videos in incognito mode.