Isn't that the definition of "worse"? "Never able to be tailored to your unique preferences" when a human could take that feedback in a single sentence and adjust? It's like the old "everyone wants to remake Excel since they realize 80% of users only use 20% of it... without realizing it's always a different 20%" saw...

I believe that you certainly could figure out a smarter approach, with enough careful thought, domain knowledge, and effort but... I haven't used any services that do it. Surface level similarities seems to be all you get, and I constantly get recommendations that a human would've stopped giving me years ago.

Maybe the domain of expert-level statisticians and experts-at-musical-knowledge-of-many-genres just don't overlap that much? It's hard to imagine you could do it truly well without content-level processing, not just user histories and connection graphs.

Just because no streaming service could afford a human to be an expert on every single user doesn't mean that the cheaper, more scalable algorithm isn't worse.