I’ve noticed the same thing and this creates such a negative user experience. Every short is a reaction test and if I fail, I get slop. Makes the whole experience very jarring (for better or for worse).
They built a slop machine, not something tuned for positive UX.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
For better or worse with regards to my addiction, my subscriptions are all either science channels or high effort / high production comedy skits (e.g. DropoutTV). I still get slop, but I never subscribe and it mostly remains background noise