It's so asinine to me that youtube curates your feed based off watch history rather than liked and subscribed to channels. Not to mention the failed shorts category which tried to compete with tiktok and is now you're annoying little brother who nags you.
I turn off watch history entirely
It nags you to turn it back on and completely disables the homepage recommended/popular feed but I've grown to like it a lot. I still go through my subscriptions tab to find stuff to watch, and I still get related videos on individual videos that I watch that I can hop to if I want to explore outside that bubble of existing subscriptions. It's like going back to 2014 youtube or whenever they started making the homepage purely algorithmic
been doing this for a while and wanna second it being a good experience. i go through my subscriptions and add things to my watch later and then browse that playlist for stuff to watch whenever