alt Hacker NewsI wonder if they are doing some A/B testing on this. I see shorts about once a month or so, which is when the "not interested" option runs its course. Other than that, they don't push it to me at all, and the app has certainly never started auto playing a short when I've opened it.
I've also never watched a short, or if I did I immediately removed it from my watch history. I do keep that trimmed with prejudice, because the algorithm is desperate to show me something other than what I normally watch.
I somewhat suspect the auto-play is a bug with "accessibility -> remove animations". There are quite a lot of Google-product bugs with it enabled (nearly all other apps I use are 100% fine), though most don't render things unusable (except the recent apps list, WOW wtf). Youtube has also lately been jumping straight to "Shorts [that I have uploaded, which is zero]" when I open the "You" section, despite it being the last in the list and completely empty - this too is very likely an animation-related bug.
Why it happens with remove-animations: well I'm pretty confident they don't test with it. But it's super freakin' weird. I kinda doubt it'll get fixed though, doing so will cause "engagement" to drop, and it has been happening for most of a year now.