You can navigate youtube to find what you're looking for with most of the javascript disabled. It renders a lot of what makes youtube awful mostly ineffective.

You can navigate youtube to find what you're looking for with most of the javascript disabled. It renders a lot of what makes youtube awful mostly ineffective. I've come to mostly search youtube explicitly for things or visit bookmarks of channels I enjoy, with most of the javascript turned off. When something looks interesting, it goes to youtube-dl and I close the tab to watch the video effectively offline. This can't work forever as it effectively removes all the advertising, at some point they're going to start injecting the ads and suggestions directly into the video stream so even tools like youtube-dl consume the garbage. But it's a marked improvement over using youtube as Alphabet intends, for now.