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.
YT addons generally don't work on Piped, but some of the most popular ones are already built in, like SponsorBlock, DeArrow and Dislike. It does show comments, but you can't post any comments yourself. HDR videos should work since it's just pulling the video files directly from YT servers.
You can just try it out, simply replace "www.youtube.com" with "piped.video" in any YT video or channel url.