I don't know how I accomplished this tbh, but I curated my homepage recommendations pretty well. It got to a point where I would not watch certain videos not out of a lack of interest, but out of not wanting the algorithm to think I wanted to see more of that shit and keep things balanced. My homepage ended up being mostly the latest content from my subscriptions anyway, with something reasonably related to them thrown in here and there. In other words, it was mildly helpful.

That was over a year ago though, and I don't know if it's changed, because I still fucking hate youtube, google, etc with a burning passion and exclusively use frontends like invidious or piped now. I have a redirect script on every browser I use to change any youtube link to one of those alternatives. I think you can still have subscriptions on some of them, but I don't use that feature.