I'm currently in the process of switching from YouTube to Piped and was getting fed up with rewriting YouTube links myself. I finally found an extension that can do this with a relatively easy setup:
Thought maybe more people might find this interesting. My setup is in the pic.
Edit: @nutbutter@discuss.tchncs.de Just suggested using LibRedirect which is even better than Redirector. Also since Redirector isn't really maintained anymore.
I've been using KISS launcher for a while. It's a search focussed launcher and you can hide the app icons.