Your medium post is not directly related to what I was referring to in my first comment. Yes, bad actors game the recommendation algorithms to troll people. That's what Elsagate was about. People deliberately making channels and videos that would appear as and presumably get recommended as kid friendly content when it was actually shock content. I'm well aware that recommendation algorithms can be abused. Perhaps I should have more strongly emphasized that my examples are presented in a very simplified scenario, that is limited to the alleged political rabbit hole and not things like Elsagate.
The point I am making is that pointing out the fact that it's possible to get to the extremes of YouTube by clicking through on recommended videos shouldn't be surprising. In fact, of you couldn't so that it would be evidence of deliberately trying to keep certain content from being popular.
The question of how well YouTube polices it's terms of service (which already does prohibit hate speech) is related to this question about the alleged rabbit hole because such content presumably exists at the edge of my hypothetical political spectrum values. But it's not directly related to the fact that clicking through on recommended links can bring people to 1 and 10 even if they start at 5 should not be surprising.