Maybe it depends on what you watch. I use Youtube for music (only things that I search for) and sometimes live streams of an owl nest or something like that.

If I stick to that, the recommendations are sort of OK. Usually stuff I watched before. Little to no clickbait or random topics.

I clicked on one reaction video to a song I listened to just to see what would happen. The recommendations turned into like 90% reaction videos, plus a bunch of topics I’ve never shown any interest in. U.S. politics, the death penalty in Japan, gaming, Brexit, some Christian hymns, and brand new videos on random topics.

I checked just now and it’s normal for me. I don’t know if the instance matters, but I’m on mastodon.social.