That being said, I live in the UK. We know it's going to base its default recommendations based on your perceived location.

I personally found that I needed to make an account to get away from the horrendous default recommendations. And allow it to use some data and not clear my cookies etc.

You're mostly correct, but I'm guessing you don't use the feature of marking videos as not interesting - it really helps, to the degree that I don't get suggested almost any right-wing videos of the disgusting kind even when I listen to music popular in those circles, as evidenced in the comments sections (I prevailingly use YT for music). Now, if only there was an option to filter out the nationalistic comments (insubstantial comments calling for "unity among brethren" and similar), too.

One has to log in to benefit from this, though.

However, most YT advertisements that get served to me are scams the last few months.

I just found out a trick where you can get rid of YouTube Shorts by marking all of them as not interesting.