I highly recommend using the "Not interested" button on anything you don't want to see. It's actually pretty effective at pruning unwanted things from your recommendations. If I get anything political or slop related, it gets the not interested button.

I also have a second channel for language learning where I used it to prune out any videos in English. It's not perfect and recommends a few still, but they get more rare as time passes.

I will try this. I have no idea what is wrong with the algo, but I've honestly thought youtube has gone way downhill since the pandemic.