That explains a lot of the experience recently, I was thinking about my old subscriptions and why they haven't made a poke in a while.
I wonder can I make my browser redirect youtube.com to actually open https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions ?
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/enhancer-for-youtu...
What they _don't_ want you to do is just watch a few channels that you subscribe to and leave the website, so they force all this other stuff you didn't ask for in hopes that you stay (which works, hence why they keep doing it).
Looks like a straightforward browser extension implementation too for a content script to inject this meta tag for select urls
https://www.w3docs.com/snippets/html/how-to-redirect-a-web-p...
Or like me: I learned to always click the subscriptions button when I'm on the start page or done watching a video. Had quite a few moments where I saw somebody complain about the home page and my first thought was "did they remove the subscriptions page?"