Haven’t Spotify mods already been clamped down in one way or the other(in terms of having a trimmed down feature set)? I used to follow Balatan’s mod from Mobilism and last I saw, Atleast some stuff was server sided.

Either case, mods can only go so far. I only used Spotify Premium once for a short while before returning back to YT Music and one of the things I liked was third party clients on desktop. ncspot is a terminal based client for Spotify that rakes in one tenth of memory requirements but sadly requires Premium and I don’t think there is any way to bypass that as of now. (though of course, most users won’t even care about such a niche client)

But if someone is serious about music, then Soulseek is the way to go. It has most genres of music, usually in flac and locally stored music is any day superior to cloud.