Yup - I just skip over youtube shorts if they come up. There is no indication how long they are, neither can I seek. I don't know if I'm about to watch a 5 second video, or a 2 minute one (or whatever the max length of shorts is). I'm not going to sit there like a drooling idiot and find out. If the content I'm looking for doesn't present itself within the first 2 seconds, I bail. and since it almost never does, I just skip shorts entirely.

I gave a grease monkey script to redirect shorts to watch. The watch?v= player works with shorts and you have a sane UI.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33560024

I expect that in 5-10 years, the Internet will be unusable without scripts and browser extensions

It’s already heading in that direction. As an example I only use the Slack web interface and have many user scripts to modify my experience.

I think the increased adoption of WASM will be a net negative for users.

I’m heavily opinionated on communication centric UX, it should work for me not the other way around.

I disallow all notifications, for example. I refuse to be forced into engagement..

Well, you can manually copy the video ID and open it in the regular watch view. Shorts use the same video ID space as regular content.