The recommendations were nice because it meant you didn't have to manually curate playlists while you're out and about (but you could still search out a specific track if you want to). I viewed them as part of the value of a subscription and didn't mind if they were promoting artists via homepage links and such.
However, in just the last few weeks I've noticed the recommendations have gone from surfacing old favorites and interesting new (to me) music and is instead pushing stuff like that big podcast guy they signed.
Honestly, the only thing I care about is audio interruptions to my music. If a record label wants to pay spotify to place a text widget on my screen that says "check out this new album", I am OK with that because it's very ignorable.
That is, what I'm paying for is "no audio interruptions".
Netflix never gave me a popup or played recommendation of anything between two episodes of a series.
I think that's what most people mean. They want to listen to an album/several/playlist and not hear anything else. (should add: and also not see any popups. Netflix doesn't give me popups, the only place I see stuff I do not want to see is the landing page)
That's so much worse than actually YouTube though. If I've been watching programming, physics, or history YouTube it absolutely surfaces excellent creators I'd have no other means of discovering.
YouTube isn't Wikipedia. I don't go into it wanting a specific narrow thing. Like how do you even find content you'd like otherwise?