The recommendation system, historically (i.e., in the long-long ago of spinning disks), was insanely good. But then Netflix moved to streaming and, as a consequence, its own--and generally less good--content.
By analogy, Netflix went from being a sci-fi future of having and being able to recommend on the basis of _everything_, to having a handful of good offerings and a huge amount of b-movie-level offerings.
My gut sense is management tried to paper over this "content loss problem" by making changes:
1) to the recommendation system to push Netflix content[1]; and
2) making changes to the UI to force users to be more reliant on the recommendation system.
I suspect these changes have, generally speaking, made user-consumption metrics look decent--in my mind the core of almost all Netflix's post-streaming decisions. But, as you suggest, it is all papering over a problem of user dissatisfaction: Netflix recommends you mediocre content, and you eventually give up and watch it--and then feel meh.
[1] I can imagine Netflix executives being unwilling to report that the content Netflix had paid mightily for scored low on Netflix's own recommendation algorithm. Philosophically, Netflix went from being, essentially, content agnostic (e.g., it just bought more of X DVD), to having incentives to see particular content (e.g., its own) rank highly.