It’s sad that we replaced manual curation with recommendation algorithms because they were doing the hard job of surfacing relevant content for us and the end result is that you’re spending more effort and intellectual energy into steering the algorithms in the right direction than we ever did before

Manual curation would be waste of time. Why should I spend hours looking through slop when I can get algorithm do it reasonably well.

Youtube actually works reasonably well, as long as you remove from history content you disliked, use do not recommend channel and possibly not interested option. It might not be highest of quality, but at least content stream then is passable.