I came here to ask if there is some way of fixing this. I'm guessing not.

Youtube lately seems particularly bad in terms of showing lots of "shorts" all over when I have zero interest in watching them, but also suggested videos seem somehow aggressively chosen. I'm not sure how to describe that, but that's what it feels like to me.

You can subscribe to channels you like, and then just look at your "Subscriptions" tab to see new content from them. They do stick a Shorts feed in there however which is annoying.

Stop looking at the homepage and go to your subscriptions instead.

There is a plugin called Unhook. It allows to remove shorts, recommendation feed, or even set subscriptions as your default page.