Couldn’t have said it better myself.

I use a custom filter in uBlock Origin to hide the recommended sidebar in YouTube (all except the video of what’s next). Even so, there will occasionally be a video in search results with a topic that might be interesting from a channel I don’t normally watch.

I’ve learned to right click and open the link in a private browsing window so that my search results (and that one remaining sidebar thumbnail) do not become poisoned by that one channel/topic.

It’s insane that clicking on one video makes YouTube think that I’m now obsessed with that channel. And, it’s going to fixate on that for the next few weeks.

That's another thing I'm tired of: manually managing the algorithm. Using private windows, on top of downvoting and hiding stuff I only wanted to see once.

I like the "idea" of the algorithm, something that finds cool stuff for me. In practice it's just one more thing I have to keep a mental model of.