No, it does not, NO USE IN THAT if you want to actually watch the video, not just read about it¹.
And it never did, as far as I can remember. Google never wanted you to do without running their nonfree programs on your machine, whether installed, updated and removed at your will, or pushed into your browser without your consent unless you are careful enough to prevent them from being executed.
This is the whole point of existence of software like NewPipe.
So this was essentially a command to give up even a mere freedom to decide what software to run on your little machine! And that while we could just install an upstream build [0]. This is a really strange thing to hear from a maintainer of free software distribution.
[0] https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe/releases/download/v0.14.1/NewPipe-v0.14.1.apk
¹ And even for reading video titles, descriptions and seeing thumbnails with just a browser you have to instruct it to introduce itself as something that is incapable of running JS (Googlebot is a good choice), otherwise youtube.com would return you nothing besides a nonfree program to run.