Nope! I did almost exactly what you described before ejecting altogether and consuming my subscriptions via RSS + a static site I generate hourly (linked in a top-level comment).

I recognize that people value YouTube for it's recommendation engine. That was never the draw for me; I just want a place to watch videos from creators I like. Overall, I found the recommendations to not work for me; they were overall noisy and distracting. Someone asked me once "well how do you find new content?", which I found hilarious.