thing is, i'd proboably have forked over the money for YouTube Premium by now if my only issue with the YouTube app was ads. its not. the app is genuinely unusable for me if I don't apply the tweaks I need, especially the one to disable Shorts functionality.
rather than allow users to make these tweaks, google would go on a witch hunt for these apps because it would be unprofitable to allow users to avoid the brainrot that is Shorts, or the many another "features" they've bogged the app down with.
Does the app let you change the playback speed to something rational like 0.9x, 1.1x, 1.2x, 1.3x? I've almost never found a video where 1.25x was the optimal listening speed. YT's default playback speeds are shit for accessibility.
Oh, interesting. I can't stand how slow videos are, so I always turn them up to 1.5 or 1.75x. Hell, the only time I ever use the default speed is for music because obviously that does not work.