Yes, this is the real answer. What you want to watch, or what you would like youtube to recommend to you, is at odds with what youtube would like you to watch (and potentially share), which is enraging, clickbaity, low quality material.

As a n=1 data point I'd like to add that I watch youtube mostly for music, and it that sense the algorithm is not so bad (since there isn't much room for "viral" clickbait), and my only complaint is that it usually shows me the same videos over and over, but it still shows me related videos that I usually like. Whenever I commit the mistake of clicking on a non-music video, my recommendations get polluted for something between one day and one week.

I never log in, so if for some reason my cookies get deleted or corrupted I suddenly get a fuckton of shit with celebrities, "outrageous" political opinions and so on. The recommendations don't get back to normal until at least 3 or 4 weeks. This has happened 2 or 3 times, and it's so infuriating that I wonder if youtube does it on purpose to nudge me into logging in and have a view history associated to my account.

Is that what it's detecting you might like due to having profiled you based on other aspects of your google identity unrelated to that cookie reset? I think if you were a teen, for example, you might get skateboarding videos or Billie Eilish or certain games or whatever teens do or like these days, rather than "X TOTALLY DESTROYS Y" (two people in suits and ties in a political debate).

I don’t log in to YouTube on any of my devices and the same thing happens to me if the cookie ever resets. You can kinda see what “real” YouTube is by just opening a private tab. After you click on something it tries really hard to funnel you into a specific demographic. I’ll see videos I’ve watched before as it’s testing the waters on what I will click on.

If I hit reload on the home page I get the same 8 videos recommended to me that I've been intentionally not watching for two weeks. Where's the ad revenue in that?

this is the answer, before you always had next to a video a list of related videos, now it just personalized recommendations to you, that's the behavior that confirms this

I hate it how the Related Videos has been reduced to 1 related video then a lot of rubbish.

Agreed. There is just too many variables at play and that assuming something we have no information on (YT Algo), we cannot assume anything.