[bleepblorp]

The function of an adtech recommendation system is not to find content that you want to see but rather to show you content that's the most profitable for the adtech firm that's serving it.

The videos that YT recommends over and over again are probably videos that have a high ratio of advertising revenue (meaning good demographics) to playback cost (meaning low overall byte size) and a high likelihood of going viral by being shared off-platform (meaning broad appeal, non-controversial, short, safe for religious conservatives, safe for work, and easy to summarize within 280 characters).

The videos you want to watch don't meet these criteria, so Youtube won't find them for you.

[lrem]

Recommending you a video you don't want to watch is a wasted opportunity. If you don't want to watch it, you won't, so YouTube's earnings are zero. If something you do want to watch is recommended instead, you will, and YouTube's earnings are nonzero.

I'm right now on a browser without my account and on which I don't usually watch YT, basically only when someone pastes a link while gaming. About half of the front page are things I might have clicked on when bored. A third are long. Two are definitely controversial. I don't buy your hypothesis.

Disclosure: I work in Google, but my closest contact with YouTube was drinking whisky with a YouTube SRE some four years ago.