The experience stinks because Youtube makes it stink. NewPipe handles video resuming, downloading, subscriptions, RSS feeds, pulling multiple videos from different services into the same viewer/manager, and they're currently looking into options to do syncing between devices/clients by doing automatic data exports and imports and pushing them into Syncthing.
All while being (imo) easier to use and (objectively) less resource intensive than the official Youtube client.
It is possible to build good video clients/services without sacrificing people's privacy. The reason Google's tracking is essential for stuff like video resume is because Google integrated those features into their tracking systems from day one, and now they don't know how to separate them.
Another example here -- if I turn off search & web tracking in my Google account, Google loses the ability to save locations in Google maps on my phone. They never considered that they could just save my locations locally and not send them to the cloud.
Google is being honest when they say they can't do stuff like auto-resume without tracking me, but they're being dishonest when they give the reason they can't do it. It's not because privacy and convenience are so impossible to reconcile, it's because (being charitable) Google engineers and managers don't have the first clue how to build a service that even tries to reconcile those ideas.
The less charitable possibility is that Google deliberately makes their services terrible when privacy options are enabled to reinforce the idea in people's minds that it's impossible to have both privacy and convenience. But while I don't assume the best of Google, I still lean towards blaming incompetence over maliciousness.