You don’t have to go for the fascism, racism, and disinformation. By shear quantity alone, they’ll be in your next 2-3 videos if you let it autoplay the next recommended video.

I haven’t found a reliable way to just play my followed channels without manually making a queue of videos.

Pihole will only ever be able to block so much, because it works at the domain level. When ads are served from the same domain as the desired content, which I believe is the case for youtube, Pihole is ineffective.

Adblocking plugins aren’t limited by this and can filter the actual content and HTTP requests made by the browser.