I came across this type of comment a lot in the past and want to elaborate on this further for context.
Public instances draw a lot of eyeballs and the tech companies go after them. Private instances are less impactful and get left alone.
I really can't overstate how miserable my video watching experience was becoming prior to self-hosting. I jumped from Piped -> Invidious -> PipedMaterial over the span of a few months as the best instances started to crap out. I used libredirect and regularly cycled through instances w/ the keyboard shortcut to find a easily watchable video.
Eventually, I bit the bullet and self-hosted a docker container of Invidious and it's like night and day. Everything just works, and you can program libredirect so that it operates as if it were a public instance.
In my experience, a lot of public instances initially work perfectly, and then get targeted and hamstrung by big tech. I think of them less as solutions and more as demos to use until things get buggy. I have had the same experience w/ teddit and searxng.