[washadjeffmad]

It has, but not because of ads or watch history. At some point over the past five years, the accuracy and immediacy of Google's search became a factor in the political stability of the US, and YouTube and Google search have been aggressively reduced to serving inert, ahistorical, commercially safe results. No monthly fee will fix that.

Non-English language search was largely unaffected until a year or two ago, but I guess tokenization has improved their ability to filter anything not on an allowlist to trend.