I pay for YouTube Premium, and it's less noticeable for me. But your complaints are spot on for me -- YouTube appears to have gotten even dumber. I believe that this is b/c YT as a platform is less profitable ... that's why they're pushing more ads. That part is pretty obvious.

But we're also seeing the other behaviours b/c overall Googs is allocating less CPU time to their naive AI recommendation engine. I feel that premium members get proportionally more AI time to tune their recommendations than freemium members.

This feels like Google turned down the AI spend across the board to increase the margin on YT as a revenue platform.

It was a bad decision.