It's not even the algorithms themselves, it's human behaviour and the magic "engagement" metric.

Of course, it's also a self-reinforcing thing; there's articles telling people to put reaction faces on their preview images to increase engagement, there's articles telling people to use jump cuts, enthousiastic / shouty voices, certain microphone / camera setups, etc. Thousands of "do this ONE TRICK to boost your engagement on youtube by 0.34%" kind of articles and tutorials, trying to cargo cult aspiring video makers into doing the same thing that some of the top youtubers do.

I'll stick to my series of disembodied hamhands and Scottish space nerds, thank you.