There are risks you have to deal with when you pirate stuff, not everything are beautiful sunsets yo know 😉😉.
Right now I'm using NewPipe x SponsorBlock and ViMusic and everything it's going apparently fine, let's see how the things evolve but right now are running smooth.
Yeah I've been using NewPipe x Sponsorblock for about 5 years, the main benefit with Spotify was that frequently accessed songs are stored locally, while newpipe streams them all over again, unless you explicitly download them. And the spotify algorithm was much better at suggesting related artists, my youtube algo is overwhelmed from all the non-music stuff I watch.
Yeah NewPipe definitely need a better cache system, and about the algorithm I truly don't know, I have years WO using Spotify since I moved to YouTube Music Premium and then to ViMusic.