For channels I care about, I subscribed to the channel's RSS feed.

For instance, there's an RSS feed at https://www.youtube.com/@TechnologyConnections/videos.

I combined this with the Distraction Free YouTube browser extension that worked really well — no recommendations would display on the home page or on an individual video page.

So I'd only look at the videos that came through my RSS reader, and I'd see no other recommendations on YouTube — in and out. There are trade offs. I'd miss out on content that I'd probably be interested in. I trusted that if there was something interesting enough, a friend would tell me.

The extension broke when YouTube started cracking down on ad blockers. I still get alerted to new videos in my RSS reader. Except now, I get sucked into recommended content sometimes when I watch a video.

I think I just realized in typing this that I need to find another extension like DF YouTube.

Found a uBlock Origin filter list that seems to work reasonably well:

https://github.com/BevizLaszlo/UBlock-Filters-for-Social-Med...