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.
That’s been happening to me also since the last update. It also won’t allow me to actually log into Lemmy. It goes through the login process, but doesn’t actually log me in. I always have to use Chrome to log in to check the mod reports since Liftoff doesn’t have that ability yet.
See my other comment regarding PiP mode (picture in picture). Another user reported that this might be a solution.