There is an 'unhook' add-on for Firefox that blocks all shorts forever. Highly recommended.
Using Unhook for 4 years, I save recommendation using my phone and watch it later on PC.
I wish there was something like this for safari on macos.
Lately the option to disable ambient lighting around video has been reseting to ON for me on every video I open.
I cant even formulate how I feel about that without breaking some rules somewhere
Those who disable watch history probably know this, but others probably don't -- when you disable watch history your "subscriptions" page effectively becomes your home page. And on your subscriptions page, shorts cannot be removed like on the actual home page. So if you disable watch history, you implicitly must enable shorts.
Like a relative commentor said -- a product manager on the "Shorts" team is doing a helluva job boosting their team's stats.
Then it was "hide shorts for X days" (I think 30?).
Now it is "show fewer shorts".