I highly recommend you stop using YouTube. It has become more addictive overtime and it will get worse. Shorts is really intense but I think YouTubes recommendations are almost just as addictive. I agree with you that some content is worth keeping tabs on. If you want to break the cycle could replacing going on the website YouTube with an RSS reader that supports subscribing to individual YouTube channels, I use feedbin but I think there are a lot of RSS readers that do this. This eliminates shorts and recommendations which really helped me.