Google put huge amounts of effort into punishing the search rankings of sites that attempted to manipulate their ranking in shady ways. YouTube could put in some amount of effort towards the same end.

Of course, that would probably reduce engagement...

"Making people want to click the video" is not shady in the same sense as SEO. A comparable trick might be jamming a bunch of keywords into the description.

Your real complaint is that people like stupid videos, but that's not YouTube's problem or fault.

The concern with SEO is that the goal is to drive traffic to a site without meaningfully improving the content. Doesn't the same argument apply here? If the video doesn't change, and it's just the title and thumbnail changing in an effort to get more clicks, how is that materially different from SEO?

Because it's the viewer deciding to choose the video, not some algorithm deciding what they get to choose from.

> Google put huge amounts of effort into punishing the search rankings of sites that attempted to manipulate their ranking in shady ways.

From the search results I get, it appears that they abandoned that effort long ago.