Parent and long-time ex-googler. I'm baffled that the original YT Kids was not whitelisted, and in fact I uninstalled it from my little one's ipads a long time ago. They were watching a Trolls (Dreamworks) animation, and I thought "boy, the writing on this isn't very good, but whatever". Then the plot started to become kinda bizarre and I realized it was a fake. As a user, I felt duped by YT Kids, who had promised me a window into the internet I can safely hand over to my <6-year olds. But really, it's just random people around the world uploading junk.

As an ex-googler who saw the way some (a few) PMs made decisions with their own Impact (aka career) in mind, I can cynically imagine them choosing the algorithmic method because at Google you must scale, and you get promoted by launching a cool machine learning product and not a product with <200 channels that were hand-selected (that's boring!). But as a parent all I wanted was just a few channels. Some disney, some science, etc.