My YouTube does not auto-play, so not sure what you mean by that. Also the ability to "hide shorts" isn't a feature I'd expect from any other web platform out-of-the-box, so definitely didn't expect to get it with my Premium subscription.
Wrt auto-dubs, they can be turned off. To me this feels less deliberately hostile on YT's part and more tunnel vision where they assumed everyone would find this to be a helpful feature and didn't even think about adding a user-level preference to disable it.
But also I find user-level preferences kinda an anti-pattern anyway. Would be nice if you disable it for one video and it just remembers that preference for the next one (or vice versa).
By auto-play I mean in the feed, there’s an option to stop it from doing that, but after a while YouTube decides to turn it on again. It also has an option to hide Shorts, but same thing, they simply ignore it. About the dub thing, I get it could be tunnel vision coming from english-only speakers, it didn’t occurred to them that outside their circles is common for people to be bilingual or even multilingual, but that auto dub thing hasn’t been fixed for years there are tons of complains, the way I “fixed” it was setting my language to English, but from time to time I get my own language dubbed to English.
Auto play as in the video starts playing immediately when you load the page, not auto play as in automatically play the next video. Only the latter is configurable by the user. YT even circumvents the browser's own auto play configuration, as pointed out elsewhere in this thread.
Also are you just skipping sponsor breaks manually? I use premium but it only covers adblocking really.