Try turning off your watch history and you'll get a clutter free home page. It doesn't include the things you subscribe to but it's better than being served shorts and garbage.
What I want is a personalized experience, yes, but based on the signals I explicitly choose to send, especially my likes, dislikes, and subs. But their recommendation system frequently mixes in other crap way too often, probably in an effort to keep up with TikTok or whatever the kids use these days. Instead, I wish I could customize the specific categories I'm interested in or not, and for the algorithm to respect my wishes. It won't do that, of course.
These days I just go to the subs list and manually see what's changed, but it's a pain in the ass. I also have a Nebula sub that I try to use instead (but its software isn't as good, especially for subtitles).