Materialious can be deployed in a lot of ways.

It can be used purely as a Invidious frontend.

You can use it as a web server with its own YouTube engine and account system.

Or you can use it as a Desktop & Mobile app with or without Invidious.

Or you can even go into the advanced settings and choose when you want to use Invidious APIs or Materialious

We altcha whats a proof of work captcha. Are you getting any console errors? You do have to wait for the captcha to complete for a bit too.

This can actually use Invidious as its backend if someone wants to.

Its basically just a more feature rich Invidious whata easier to deploy.

Yeah if you are running a private instance, you look like legitimate traffic to Google.