Pretty much that, yep.

There's very little productive new ground to grow on if you're working on YouTube.

There's existing glaring site problems, but they're on purpose and ideologically driven (shorts, placebo dislike, subscriptions mean nothing) so no one is going to touch them. It's politically safer and more advantageous to mess with the UI and irritate all the users every couple years.

What ideology is driving this?

I assume OP didn't mean that a single overarching ideology was driving all if these changes, but rather that each of them individually is ideologically driven (and therefore immune to questioning). They all seem to be directly counter to the end-user's desires but are off-limits to redesign.

Pretty much what I had intended by that comment, yeah.

YouTube know that the choices they've made are qualitatively bad because users overwhelmingly complained about them (dislike button being the most obvious example of that)

...but quantitatively numbers didn't go down enough to force any kind of retraction or even recognition of discontent, so now we're stuck with the results.

This is just what happens when groups of people work together.

But what about fixing the obvious, common, and annoying bugs in the web version? That doesn't count as an accomplishment?

the bugs in the web version are intentional to get you to download the app. you should be smart enough to figure this out by now

It's similar to the "shipping your org chart" problem. Constant redesigns means you are shipping your employee performance review and incentive structure.

I think people are being a bit cynical with that take, although it's not completely unfounded. There are other factors like new technologies that are overall better, and also restructuring of teams due to people leaving and/or layoffs. What you end up with is a codebase or parts of the codebase that accumulate "damage" (or increase in entropy), and sometimes the easiest thing to do is to start something from scratch again.

So yeah sometimes the path of least resistance is building something new.

it's called resume driven develobment