I turned off watch and search history because of this. There are a lot of downsides (you lose progress meters and recommendations tend to suggest watched videos

I turned off watch and search history because of this. There are a lot of downsides (you lose progress meters and recommendations tend to suggest watched videos a lot), but there are upsides too: namely, that YouTube only considers upvotes, subscriptions, and "Not Interested" when it makes recommendations, so your homepage is only stuff you've explicitly signalled that you're interested in, plus YouTube's usual spam (the off-the-wall suggestions they always have no matter what—for whatever reason I get a lot of cat/dog and meditation music videos).