That’s my experience as well. I’ve been a Mint user for around 6 years (2012 to 2018 or 2019), with different DEs (Gnome, Cinnamon and Mate) and installations and there was always something that stopped working all of a sudden, or something wrong with Mint altogether that made the experience bittersweet. I even tried LMDE for a bit and didn’t last a week using it.
I ended up hopping to Antergos (RIP) and have been with it ever since.
I’ve been using Pinchflat for a while and so far it’s been great for me. It can automatically rescan the channel or playlist on a defined time (like every day or every week), and download new videos. It uses yt-dlp so you can configure all the parameters you want it to use for the download