If you only visit youtube.com logged out in a private window, obviously it's going to show you what's the most popular. What else should it be doing?
Personally I never see those top 1000 creators / influencers / celebrities. If anything I find the recommendation algorithm too tuned to my topics of interest so it rarely surfaces new things.
Agreed on the search being less than useless, though.
Agreed. Youtube recommendations are genuinely great for me. Most of the time I'll be recommended so many more good videos than I have time for, that my "watch later" playlist only keeps growing.
Compared with, say, Netflix, where even though I've been rating everything I watch on there for 5+ yrs, the recommendations still barely feel personalized (if anything, it feels like it personalizes which premade "top list" to show me, but not the titles within them...but it does personalize the cover art/thumbnail, lol).
I don't only get to YouTube.com from a Google search and that on a browser that I'm not logged into - so it only shows me things that I searched for.
I'm of the opinion that people who get recommended constant slop are doing something very wrong, likely going out of their way to anonymize themselves as much as possible, then being all Surprised Pikachu when YouTube can't figure out what kind of content they like, so they get recommended the lowest common denominator popular stuff.
My feed is all channels I'm subscribed to or content from other creators that make similar content. I don't get Mr Beast or any other the other crap that people complain about.