The Unhook extension on Firefox does a very good job of hiding various parts of YouTube (including Shorts) that you don't want to see/access.

I use the YouTube app very rarely, but out of curiosity I went to iOS YouTube app settings, and I wasn't expecting this, but apparently in Time Management you can set Short Feed limit to 0 and this hid shorts completely from my YouTube app home feed and I can't scroll to the next Short when I open one.