I think the reason they removed dislike counts may be exactly because people (like you) tended to click away immediately on seeing a high ratio of dislikes. It'

I think the reason they removed dislike counts may be exactly because people (like you) tended to click away immediately on seeing a high ratio of dislikes. It's game theory. If people do that, it means their recommendation algorithm's watch time and retention metrics get bad data; users aren't actually assessing how good the video is, but assessing previous viewers' assessment of it, so you get signal feedback. If someone can get a good snowball effect going by brigading a bunch of dislikes on a video, they can reduce its reach even if the algorithm is showing it to people just as much. And it can snowball the other way too; people watching a long video a bit more hoping it will get good eventually because it has such a high ratio of likes. Just speculating of course.