Whatever team improves livestreaming has been really responsive to creator requests. I believe that if YouTube executes, they'll kill Twitch entirely. Question is if they manage to execute, I'm not confident that it will continue to happen.

They're starting to find the balance between their promotion of smaller creators vs things like disinfo. They're in my opinion more open about how The Algorithm(tm) works vs other social platforms. They've been de-emphasizing gameable metrics as opposed to "do people actually watch the video" metrics.

Shorts is... fine, but they're far more fair to creators than TikTok is. TikTok Creator Fund has poor creator incentives, YouTube Shorts monetization is actually aligning the interests of YouTube as well as creators. (I do have some minor quibbles with some messaging there but what matters is the shape of the agreements.)

They've also recently resolved the whole "should I make a new channel for shorts or post them to my current channel" problem, which is nice.

I dunno that's off the top of my head.

I too hate them and don't want anything optimized for minute long content.

This is a kind of fun game of whack-a-mole, but here is my current ruleset for uBlock Origin:

    www.youtube.com###guide-content #endpoint[title="Shorts"]:upward(ytd-guide-entry-renderer)
    www.youtube.com###items #endpoint[title="Shorts"]:upward(ytd-mini-guide-entry-renderer)
    www.youtube.com##ytd-browse ytd-grid-video-renderer:has(span.ytd-thumbnail-overlay-time-status-renderer[aria-label="Shorts"])
    www.youtube.com##ytd-browse ytd-rich-item-renderer:has(span.ytd-thumbnail-overlay-time-status-renderer[aria-label="Shorts"])
    www.youtube.com##ytd-search ytd-video-renderer:has(span.ytd-thumbnail-overlay-time-status-renderer[aria-label="Shorts"])
    www.youtube.com##ytd-watch-next-secondary-results-renderer ytd-compact-video-renderer:has(span.ytd-thumbnail-overlay-time-status-renderer[aria-label="Shorts"])