I don't even care about any of that. I simply don't want to log into youtube because the recommendations inevitably turn to shit and I don't want to be stuck with them. The only sane way to use youtube is to never log in and nuke the session every week or so.
YouTube recommendations have worked very well for me. I listen to a lot of talks and if it weren't for the recommendations I wouldn't have discovered some very interesting talks or even areas. The only time the recommendations derail is when I have guests over and they login into my account (because that's the one always logged in on my roku). But that is expected. And it's easy to get rid of, by deleting the history in a custom date range, or simply by continuing to watch the kind of stuff I was watching earlier.
You can turn watch history off, and then you don’t get any recommendations at all - just the channels you subscribe to. YouTube doesn’t like it - and goes out of its way to make the apps feel a bit broken with out it, but I much prefer to curate my own list of channels without an algorithm trying to keep me watching longer than I mean to.
