It would be a lot better if the user just had more control over the recommendation algorithm, either to replace it with an alternative or tune it. For example, I never want to watch YouTube shorts. Every time I see them, I click "show less often" since it is the only way I can express this preference, and still YouTube shows me them.

Obviously YouTube knows that even among people who do this, they still get good engagement out of YouTube shorts, so they keep showing them, but these users have explicitly asked YouTube to not show them.

It would be like a recovering alcoholic whose landlord comes by every week and leaves free samples of booze, because they get paid by the booze company, even though the alcoholic has asked them to stop.