Of course it's horrible. It's a cheap copy of a Chinese app which itself is designed horribly. YouTube added the feature out of pure panic instead of try to create something better, the poor result is expectable.

I mean, to be slightly pedantic, TicTok is not a horrible design. It is a genius design with a horrible purpose. It’s genius because it’s extremely successful at its core purpose: driving engagement metrics for ad revenue. In terms of raw engagement, an endless stream of videos injected into your brain is way better than something like YouTube, where you’re normally doing some “heavy lifting” to curate your own content via search or subscriptions. TikTok is probably the best implementation (so far) of an addicting content consumption platform. By “best,” I mean it has the best engagement metrics.

Youtube Shorts is just a frontend, you can watch those videos with the same UI as regular youtube by changing the url from youtube.com/shorts/xyz to youtube.com/watch?v=xyz.