It’s already listed as a feature on the github page

I’m not a fan of the xfce UX at all, and multi-monitor support still has a lot of issues (under Debian 12), but I am pretty sure having different refresh rates is possible

It’s most likely watching Youtube with your VPN that’s broken then, not NewPipe. Youtube implemented Captchas for IPs that generate a lot of traffic/a lot of people are using. That’s how they are trying to kill frontends like invidious that proxy the requests. NewPipe by default uses your own IP so it doesn’t have that problem. If you use a VPN IP that a lot of others are using too, you’ll get that same problem though.

It can be on your home network, but it needs to be reachable via HTTPS through the internet. So yeah, a vps is probably the best option.

(i come from a completely different culture, where sexual assaults are extremely uncommon).

It is more likely that you are just not aware of it.

As long as your apt sources (/etc/apt/sources.list) are set to bullseye (and not eg. stable) you won’t “accidentally” upgrade to bookworm. At least that’s how it works in Debian, I assume raspbian is the same.