A few months ago they required that you have a watch history to display the homepage.
This week they're showing up next popups even when you have autoplay turned off.
Using an Apple TV I probably watch more YouTube than any other platform and was given a gift of a premium subscription. It removed all ads, gave me YouTube music, but the shitty experiments continue and there's no way to tell YouTube to sod off.
I've yet to find an alternative, but I'm looking..