[j1elo]

The platform itself wants to shove Shorts and other mindless consumption content down your throat, because their interests are different than yours, even opposite one could say. So your only options are to find tools that allow pushing back (or just abandon the platform, but that's very difficult precisely because they have taken care to extinguish any practical chance of alternatives to sprout over the years).

On a desktop with a decent browser you should be able to use uBlock Origin (not a random addon by any reasonable measure) and the user-contributed rules from here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/wiki/solutions/youtube...

(remember this is a fight against interests of the provider vs those of their users, so expect it being a cat-and-mouse game of rules that stop working).

On handheld devices, any system that respects user authority to do as they please (i.e. not an iPhone) can install a patched version of the YouTube {revanced.}app, which ironically attends better to its users' needs, and allows disabling Shorts altogether. Again, it's a bit of an antagonist position, so breakages can happen (VERY rarely, though).