I haven't tried TikTok, so I can't really comment, but I've heard the same in regards to their recommendations. YouTubes algorithm, is either fantastically broken, or really devious. Recommendation fall into two main categories, interspersed with a few good videos: Completely broken, as in presenting videos from 20 year old women making videos about how their boyfriend suck or complaining about things I can't relate to as a 40 years old dad. I mean the target audience is way off. The other category is an attempt to push evermore extreme toxic masculinity videos.
Intermixed with the two categories are a few videos, which in my case are two military analysts, which I do enjoy. The thing is, you get a video that makes you think: "This is pretty good", then you're hit with either something that actually pisses you off or go "why the hell am I seeing this?". I believe that in my case it's a question of the going back and forth between: Hey this is interesting and then "why are you showing me this crap" and trying to make it learn to not show me junk content. And Shorts is MOSTLY junk, the majority of the videos are absolute garbage. So for me, it's 50% emotional rollercoaster and 50% technically curiosity.
Liking and disliking videos does NOTHING for the recommended videos. It seems like the recommendation engine only understand genres or categories when doing recommendations, but not when you hit dislike on a bunch of videos of the same type. It works create for normal YouTube videos, but not on Shorts.
I've resorted to a Firefox plugin that just removes Shorts from the YouTube sidebar and then removing the panel... Though YouTube tells me it will be back in 30 days, at which point I'll have to remove it again.