As if people haven't been addicted to watching TV for the past five decades. You decide for yourself what kind of content to get from YouTube, they don't force you into harmful habits.

Recommendations, promotion, automatically playing a related video after the one you watched ended, etc.

Even a landing page with "tailored for you" or "currently popular" is a distracting attention grab, and that attention grab leads to the addictive nature.

Combine that with how those YouTube recommendations and search rankings seem to prioritize click bait titles and cover image, and yes, I think you can start forming a thesis that in-fact, they are trying to force you into more screen time spent watching more YouTube videos.

Have you ever used Youtube? Serious question? There is next to no way to tell them what kinda of content I want. I pay for YT premium and recently my Android tv youtube is full of sports/football games at the top, never i have watched a sports game on YT. Shorts are shoved down your thrown on desktop or mobile, even with paid thers no way to turn that off.

If that doesn't work, you can use your subscription page as your entry to YouTube and you won't see any recommendations at all.

God forbid I watch a one-off video on a topic I'm not typically interested in, like woodworking. Current iteration of Youtube algorithm seems to boil down to "oh I see that you watched ONE woodworking video? Well half of your homepage is about woodworking for the next week!". I've started watching videos in incognito mode which I definitely didn't need to do a couple of years ago.

Current Youtube UX is beyond terrible, half the time I can't even find what I'm looking for through search because they arbitrarily cut off real search results to push clickbaity dopamine-sucking content.

If they want me to pay for Premium, they need to do more than just removing ads, the entire experience needs to feel, well, Premium. They could add customization options for the homepage and search results so we can remove shorts and all the "For you" crap, add knobs to tweak recommendations, return dislike counters which were the best way of quickly filtering out terrible/clickbaity/dangerous content. They could even add some power user features like being able to find videos by searching through their indexed transcripts rather than by the title alone.

YouTube search results are awful, can't disagree with you on that. The same for shorts. Searching for videos on Kagi or FreeTube instead of inside YouTube can be a better option. I've also noted that YouTube search results are much better on the TV than on desktop, and that they don't suggest "Others also watched.." crap there.

As for premium, I only consider it that I'm paying for the bandwidth to have the videos delivered to my computer, phone and TV without any ads. Just for that, it is incredible value already. Adding the features you list would make it even better.

I wouldn't call somebody who sits and watch YouTube clickbait "a victim".