I never liked shorts on Youtube, even from the creators that I follow. If I want shorts, I go to Tik Tok.
Except that, the Youtube suggestions for me aren't bad. I do believe they are less good than before, because in the past I was able to find at least one new really good channel per month and now it has been a long time without one. It could also be that I found most channels that interest me, or that the pandemic did affect this quite a bit. I still get mostly good recommendations, a third are channels I already subscribe to (which is redundant on the frontpage as I go to the subscriptions pages for that) and videos I already watched, but everything else is mostly content I may be able to enjoy.