I too have noticed a lot more slop in my feed the last several months, and generally have to explicitly check my subscriptions to be sure I don't miss videos.

And I'm quite deliberate with avoiding ragebait and slop, and I remove stuff from my watch history if I get duped etc.

That said, I have noticed a trend amongst the creators I've subscribed to that the average video length has gone up. This has been a longer term trend, but many who used to do 30-40 min videos now often to 1-1.5 hr videos.

I've heard YouTube punishes people quitting a video midway, so perhaps there's something going on there too. At least for myself I often have to watch these videos over multiple sessions, and chances are there that I just forget and move on.

So perhaps some compounding factors making things worse.