Yup, can understand if your library is small, but for bigger libraries that's definitely the most inconvenient thing you can do.

Speaking from experience because I was basically forced to do it that way when I didn't have regular internet access yet. My library was longer than 50 days. Just Hip-Hop alone was above 100GB.

I used to find a shitton of music that way, but the inconvenience was real. Worst was music that I had to tag myself for example. Love mp3tag but that's shit.

I find it inconvenient to have limited skips and depend on one service to give you the song you want with the version you want. Also spotify ui doesn't make sense to me, things just don't work at times. Not to mention the ads.

You can download audio from YouTube as 160kbps opus files, which aren't lossless sure but it's the highest quality you can get from YouTube if alternate means aren't an option.

I haven't noticed any quality issues and I only listen to mp3s from youtube

100% this. Paying $12 a month for basically all music I’ll ever want to listen to, is just an amazing deal. It’s so convenient. Felt the same when Netflix came about. But now when I need like 6 services, and there’s still lots not on them. Piracy is just so much more convenient.

personally I don't find that convinience worth it for the money/ads and other inconveniences, but that varies from person to person

I made myself a python script to automatically tag and download entire albums from youtube at a time. I use syncthing to automatically sync it all. Quality isn't the best but I can't tell anyway so

Fwiw, some youtube to mp3 converters will let you convert full playlists (don't remember which, but there are a few).