That's curious, because in my opinion YouTube recommendations haven't been any good since 2009. Instead of getting interesting, strange and niche content, I'm bombarded with videos that have >100k views, feature clickbait titles and thumbnails and are generally incredibly low effort content.

Methods that work better for a population as a whole might not work better for a large subset of that population, and might even cause users to stop using features entirely. The lack of transparency in recommendation algorithms combined with the homogenizing effect of distributing low-quality content this way is something I find somewhat depressing.