Yeah, I find it odd how hard they push it, like trying to shove it down my throat levels of pushing shorts. I already use their platform heavily, just for regular videos. My guess is they get more data from how you interact with shorts and they find that to be super valuable info over what they get from regular video watching.

Funny enough, last I saw, shorts of course are less profitable than videos, because they can't carry as many ads, and supposedly advertisers would rather put their ads on longer videos anyway. This would imply they just want to stay relevant. After all, if they didn't make short form videos, someone somewhere would be convinced they are missing out (personally I find shorts a lot worse than long videos).