I heavily use the "Not interested" and the "Do not recommend this channel" options a lot and don't click on clickbait, and use the DeArrow extension, and this way my front page looks quite good.
No, I often get nice recommendations from the long tail, like interesting academic talks or tinkerer channels, videos sometimes with only a few hundred views or even fewer.
Algorithms are sold as “curation is hard, the algorithm does it for you” but getting the algorithm to do a good job is actually a lot of work