it's always either a hit or a miss. The player UI really needs to show if the instance you're streaming from is online and working or not. Otherwise, you just keep waiting for the loading to complete, but it never does and you go the the preference to check and the instance isn't up anymore. You change it back to another instance, go back to the player, check again and change instance again until it works. Then sometime later the same thing happens again.

Newpipe mostly always works and is good enough for me.