This should also leave you on a slightly older version of the app, too, which might bypass any recent issues with updates. But, it has a ton of useful builtin features, like bring-back-dislikes and sponsorblock.
They let you follow channels and build playlists without a Google account and play stuff in background.
You can find those apps on F-Droid by adding the relevant repositories.
I do appreciate NewPipe for helping cut down on YT feed scrolling and just focusing on subscriptions. For a while I'd completely migrated to NewPipeSponsorblock but that fork became unmaintained and at the time there didn't seem to be an alternative.
Further, it's now easier than ever to decouple one's online life from google and so anyone not doing so is taking unnecessary risk.
2. There's strength in numbers. Between adblockers, foss clients, and youtube-dl/yt-dlp, there are probably tens to hundreds of millions of people watching youtube this way. If YT banhammers everyone for that they would end up banning a sizable fraction of the earth's population all in one day. Even Google isn't stupid enough to do that.
I guess it is good to keep people aware of the possibility, but I do also want as many people as possible to join in. If they want to ban all of us, that's fine by me. Sincerely.
As far as I know, you can indeed disable Shorts in ReVanced. The defaults in ReVanced may need some tweaking to your liking, but there's quite a lot of options.