I currently use the external player with FreeTube (set it to use MPV) It’s not as good as the original player (for comments for instance), but at least it works

As said below, it won’t affect users right now running custom ROMs, but it will impact the number of persons able to use them

Well, I just checked on the stats of the battery, and the status says “dead”

So maybe it’s just a coincidence it happened at the same time? Battery is at around 700 cycles.