Worse yet: there's also a "previously watched" section, which - as far as I can tell - ignores your search query entirely and just spits out a few videos from your watch history.
I'm at least spared from that because I turned off YouTubes watch history completely. I find it's better behaved that way because the related videos section just shows videos similar to the one I'm watching, rather than trying to "learn" my interests and invariably getting it completely wrong.
Amusingly if you turn off the watch history then the frontpage passive aggressively refuses to show you anything, rather than falling back to showing your subscriptions, which you still have to click through to a separate page to see.
I finally turned on the watch history because the suggestions without it were so far out. It used to be that you'd watch a video or two and then suggestions would get really good, even without history being enabled but at some point it switched to just recommending popular junk instead of trying to curate things based on the last couple of videos you'd watch.
Amusingly if you turn off the watch history then the frontpage passive aggressively refuses to show you anything, rather than falling back to showing your subscriptions, which you still have to click through to a separate page to see.