I was wondering why I randomly received two emails that looked like spam from them, I originally thought they got hacked or something.

If you didn’t get the emails, they had the n-word in the title and contained a list of seemingly random users. It looked like what they did was create a fake project named “truth” and I’m guessing they had a bot create a bunch of fake issues for that project that just contained user names that the bot scraped from the website.

I don’t think so, YouTube’s new method for blocking third party clients seems to be difficult to work around. I have the Linux version of the NewPipe app and that seems to be working but I don’t use VPNs, so I don’t know if that would work for you.