> Stop clicking on clickbait slop and it will stop showing that to you.
Unfortunately, this simply isn't true. YouTube doesn't recognize "clickbait slop" as a topic of its own; it's a type of content which can be associated with many different topics. For instance, let's say that a child is interested in cats. They will probably be recommended a lot of horrible AI slop videos about kittens, even if they never click on any of them.
As I said, it won't work for kids. It does work for me, it demonstrably works. And yes, I sometimes watch cute animal videos. I watch some videos from the guy who brings his pet duck places, and the Japanese otter videos too. My recommendations stick with those and I don't get any AI slop or any of the fake sob story slop or any of that. It's a matter of exercising discipline about what videos you interact with. Turn off autoplay (no account needed), don't click or even mouse hover any slop in related videos or the end cards, and it will keep your front-page clean. The front-page really does reflect what you interact with.