The answer is super simple. Wrong incentives + lack of mechanisms to find, navigate to and promote interesting content. Nowadays, people create content on You

The answer is super simple. Wrong incentives + lack of mechanisms to find, navigate to and promote interesting content. Nowadays, people create content on Youtube essentially only for profit (be it actual profit from Youtube or promotion). That's it. That's what you are selecting from. There are of course exceptions, but these are rare enough to not dictate the general quality of content. And if you are dissatisfied with general quality, that's it. There is no catalog where you can drill down and search for stuff that you don't know but you might be interested in. You can only search for things you already know -- and really interesting things tend to be a bit outside of what you already know.