If you don’t like the gestures (like me) the most recent version has options to turn them off and give you buttons instead. For me thunder is nearly there in terms of being the experience I want. I wish it handled that back button better, but all the other apps like Jerboa also suffer poor back button behaviour too.
The main difference that has me using LibreTube rather than NewPipe is because my subscriptions are on my piped account so they are synced between phone and desktop (browser). Piped is built on top of NewPipe’s extractor library anyway.