I think it’s the same thing, except I am pulling the pre-built image

Are you talking about the “The page needs to be reloaded” error?

The current solution is to use nieveve/piped-backend for the API.

I have used their image before, when there was an issue with Piped appearing as a bot and requiring captcha.

What are the advantages of Invidious, compared to Piped?

I have been self-hosting Piped for the last 3 years, but I never tried Invidious.

When you create VMs/containers, there is an option on the network step to set the VLAN tag to use

If you have a Mikrotik router, you can use its built-in Dynamic DNS, and configure a CNAME on your domain name