I'd gladly pay for Premium (I'm already paying for YT Music, the price difference is minimal) if they allow turning off shorts. But they won't. They see time spent in app goes up when they hypnotize the users. They're too Goodhart'ed to realize that quite a lot of users don't enjoy being hypnotized.

Even with premium, the official YouTube app has a much worse UX than NewPipe (and is proprietary).

I do this and I am still considering going third party if I can’t turn off shorts soon

Fuck Google. Knowingly providing a platform for scammers and flooding the recommendations with absolute garbage should not be rewarded. If valuable channels don't have a way to support them outside of Youtube, then so be it.