Enshittification

I really don't understand the complaints on the "new" side. Most of them aren't even real, and it makes me wonder whether or not OP actually even uses YT at all.

• Only promotes large channels - This hasn't been true for a while, and YT's actually been recommending a lot more smaller channels more often. I'm constantly being suggested channels I've never heard of, with sub-100 view counts. They even announced fairly recently that they were further stepping up recommendations for smaller channels, too.
• Does nothing about Elsagate - What year is it??? The Elsagate trend has almost entirely died out, largely because the target audience has grown up and the newer generation of kids aren't engaging with that kind of material. There's only a very small handful of channels still making that sort of content, and they're not getting anywhere near the views they used to, because YT has filtered a lot of that out from child viewers now. The only Elsagate videos that I can see right now are "Elsa and Spiderman do something normal, nothing weird with vomit or syringes happens and Spiderman doesn't get pregnant".
• No dislikes - They never mattered to begin with. Videos were almost always either 5% liked or 95% liked, and to glean any reasoning for those scores required more research than any user was ever putting in, anyway. It rarely ever represented the quality of the content, and it certainly didn't discourage YouTube from recommending disliked videos, because they recognize dislikes the exact same as a like; it's user engagement, so disliked videos were still recommended all the same.
• The videos are forgettable slop - Subscribe to better channels then, that's 100% a you problem. There's still plenty of excellent content available, and it's not that hard to find. If you subscribe to trash channels, you're going to see trash videos. Play with the search more often.
• Soulless channel layout - It was never anything more than a grid of thumbnails, what sort of layout nostalgia could you possibly have?
• Makes a shitty TikTok clone - Then don't use it, it's super easy to avoid; the videos have a special icon, a vertical thumbnail, and are in their own section on the page. It's hard to accidentally watch YT Shorts.
• Makes the site kid-friendly despite having an app for kids - I don't even know what this is supposed to mean. What about it is "kid friendly" at all? The fact that you can't put tits in a thumbnail? I have no clue what this is even referring to.
• Age restricts videos for content that can be found in G-rated films - I think you may overestimate what is allowed for a G rating in films. Age-restriction occurs for more than just sex, violence, and profanity. In most cases, the subject material, itself, is what warrants the age-restriction.

I hate having to defend one of the biggest corps on the planet, but this is just not real.