I kind of dig that honestly. Especially since, as noted previously, the algorithm seems to just pin you into whatever you watched recently. It clearly was updated to keep me on as long as possible. So it just feeds me that. This doesn't serve me. It serves YT. It used to at least be a mutually beneficial thing, but the incentive was to go all the way in their favor without regard for my wellbeing or interest. The feed became the loop. And we've seen this over the years with things like "click the notification bell". So we all knew it was happening. They forced the notification section into the feed. And it's so unusable that I just don't, so now I'm shown the same four videos. So it's basically already what you're describing. I have to manually find what I want anyway. Might as well do it on my own system that I control.

Those real-world constraints are the reality that these companies tried to hide with the free lie. The cost was literal life hours and psychological/biological manipulation to pay for it. Now we have psychological, biological, social and economic problems just so people don't have to pay for content.