Out of the box it can play audio in the background, and now that extensions are available you can block ads as well. You don’t really need constantly updating 3rd party clients or questionable firewalls anymore if you just want usable youtube on a phone.
As far as I know, you can’t log in to your account with newpipe. I use revanced and have no issues
You will have to add your channels once. These can be backed up into a file and imported onto another device. Not super convenient but compared to how annoying the official app is I am OK with it.
It won’t track watch status across different platforms/devices though. Revanced is significantly easier to setup and use.