I have a strange suggestion, so I understand if it’s not for you. Its not really young adult, more sci-fi, and it requires you to not have arachnophobia... (It was actually the first book I read after going through exposure therapy for arachnophobia)
Children of Time. It is by far my favorite book of all time, and definitely fits your criteria of not having the strong female lead(s) take submissive roles. At the very least not to any male characters, and never romantically.
Now, Children of Time is great, and not very scary, mostly just interesting, exciting, or thrilling. There is however an aspect of its sequel, Children of Ruin that absolutely scared me (but in a fantastically interesting way). So if scary isn’t your thing I might stick to the first one.
(The spiders I mention for the arachnophobia warning are NOT antagonists, I just couldn’t originally read it because just mentioning the word spider would give me a panic attack.)