Personalized recommendations make or break certain businesses like media and e-commerce. Not unusual to see an increase in revenue between 10% and 30% after adding recommendations. They're not "universally trash", since the alternative is showing you truly random items, or whatever item is the most popular.
Check YouTube's "trending" tab and come back here to say if you'd rather have that instead of the personalized recommendations.
YouTube's trending tab is algorithmically generated, not the actually most popular. That's why is called something vague like "trending" and not "most popular".
It is trash, but that's what you get when you use data based recommendations.
Check YouTube's "trending" tab and come back here to say if you'd rather have that instead of the personalized recommendations.