Youtube isn't really the same.
I've found that I can watch the things I want to fine without seeing a single political video being suggested.
I find that YT actually badly overfits my history; it’s super predictable and narrow.
Sure it’s preferable to falling off the bandwagon into conspiracy, but it doesn’t really “explore” a lot for me
If you browse YouTube with cookies disabled or within a cookie fence, you can see that such manipulation is the default behavior. For a significant percentage of videos, the very first set of suggestions is manipulative. For the others, perhaps the first set of suggestions is not problematic but the suggestions for those videos are where the manipulation starts.
It's nice that you found a way out of it but I'm guessing that's rare.
One has to log in to benefit from this, though.
However, most YT advertisements that get served to me are scams the last few months.
I personally found that I needed to make an account to get away from the horrendous default recommendations. And allow it to use some data and not clear my cookies etc.