Yeah, it's kind of the same way people have been saying Google search has been going downhill for years, but compressed into a much shorter time frame.
It has and so has the YouTube algo. You can try the verbatim setting with search to see that there has been some monkeying going on but even that doesn’t fix everything. Maybe that’s due to spam sites but it just seems less effective.
It has and its gone downhill alot in the past 4-5 years. This is due to the need to keep an ever increasing stream of income flowing to google with a mostly static number of users and "fixing" this issue by piling more ads into users search results.
Then just use an Ad Blocker. The actual problem is SEO spam though.