Original youtube is there, it's called subscriptions tab. A curated list of high-quality content creators accumulated for over a decade.

Youtube certainly took a lot of unpopular decisions lately, but being able to stream any hi-res video ever posted in an instant and for "free" is a miracle. I will be happy with youtube for as long as content creators I care about are happy and I can get their fresh content via browser, yt-dlp, or other means.