My biggest problem with YT recommendations is that they dramatically overweight recent videos when generating the recommendations. I mean, I can spend a week doing nothing but watching (well, listening) to videos of classical music performances, and my recommendations will be full of classical music, exactly as you'd expect. Then I watch one random one-off thing, like "15 funny pitbull fails" and suddenly ALL of my recommendations are animal videos. Then I have to go manually edit my feed history and remove "15 funny pitbull fails" to get my recommendations back to normal.

It's terrible. I have to completely log out when I watch videos which put me to sleep a couple times /week because I don't want my suggestions filled with dry history lectures.

If you're on mobile, there's an incognito mode (at least on Android).

https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe

No ads, no direct tracking [1], just videos.

[1] Google can still watch your device downloading videos of course...