Maybe it looks identical on the surface but seems like you haven’t actually compared it by using it or looking at the features list on the site. I wanted to move away from using YouTube in the browser but wasn’t satisfied with FreeTube as it missed a lot of power-user features I have previously used extensions and userscripts for. To one of my feature-requests (channel-specific playback speed) they just said it’s “too niche” (as they do with a lot of them) what brought me to starting the project.