YouTube Premium is the best $10 I spend per month. Nowhere else can I consistently find the sort of niche content that interests me.

More channels are fighting for attention though, so finding more channels are "creating buzz" or "news" based on mediocre information ie. taking things out of context and making unwarranted conclusions or blowing things out of proportions for clickbait titles.

"This changes everything!!"

Getting youtube fatigue.

I heavily use the "Not interested" and the "Do not recommend this channel" options a lot and don't click on clickbait, and use the DeArrow extension, and this way my front page looks quite good.

At this point you’re doing almost as much work as if you handpicked a few channels and put them in your RSS reader.

Algorithms are sold as “curation is hard, the algorithm does it for you” but getting the algorithm to do a good job is actually a lot of work

That’s not an argument against the comment you responded to.

If I just took any random 20 creators I’m subscribed to on YouTube, the premium membership fee, which includes YT Music, is more valuable than any of the other streaming services.

The only other streaming service I’ve been a paying member even longer than YouTube is di.fm

I also occasionally pay for a few months or bassdrive.com and or soma.fm

For movies / series, I’m back to sharing.

Disabled recommendations. Disabled comments (firefox plugin). Use subscriptions page as the homepage (firefox plugin). Only subscribe to channels that interest me (and aren't annoying like that).
The browser extension "DeArrow" is well worth a look.

I've started putting together a curated directory of (subjectively) good YouTube channels and videos [1]. It's literally the 3rd day, so not many entries yet, but I plan to continue growing it like I did with Minifeed [2].

1. https://skyshelf.app/

2. https://minifeed.net/