Seems a bit weird to say "never watch youtube". It's like never reading a book anymore because someone gave you a bad one. It's up to you to filter out content you dislike, just like with everything else.
There's only a few YouTubers I have time for like ones that don't hide complexity, such as Dave Jones from EEVBlog.
A case in point would be this article, as it is clearly written, balanced and very digestible.
YouTube’s algorithm is pretty good at doing this for you!
"Oh, you're watching a video on foo? Here's a list of video clickbait trash, with sometimes one more video on foo thrown in.
"Oh, you either never open or always bail out of 'shorts'? Here are more of them!"
The "Shorts" section can be hidden pretty easily.
For me, YouTube hasn't been able to suggest properly for years; ages ago, suggestions were all clearly related to the current video in some way. The old behaviour lead me to spend lots of time on YouTube.
When "Shorts" started appearing on the main page, it somehow seemed like I couldn't get rid of it. I somehow don't want to see it ever, on any computer so it being default is as evil to me as blinking ads.
The addition of forced-autoplay-unless-you-sign-in[1] is definitely a case of Making It Suck[2].
So, I increasingly use other clients, or exclude YouTube results from searches. This pretty well gets me away from clickbait rubbish like "$profession doesn't want you to know this!!", grossly exagerated faces/postures, and Shorts.
[1] Welll… actually I guess it's "default to autoplay whether signed in or not, and keep resetting it if you're not signed in".
[2] Meaning, moving people towards what another behaviour by making something else more difficult.
I also get annoyed by the Shorts section (they're almost pure clickbait/teasers, addictive but no real content, waste of my time!). But I can just click the "X" and it disappears for 30 days. If they didn't have the "close for 30 days" option, I agree, this would really suck.