EDIT: I have my YouTube history off for years. However, I still had the home feature but based only in subscriptions, likes and dislikes. It was a crap, and was crap in the time I had history on too. Recently, YouTube removed the home feature for me and made that.
They sell this crap feature, that basically serves only to sponsor right wing media for no reason, as if it was a greate and modern feature, and as if it was worth enough to give Google the commercial right to my activity on YouTube. This shit is so useless that I am using only the subscriptions tab with PocketTube, since the default one is also crap.
I wonder if using the same account since 2003 makes it work better? I’ve been on YT since its inception, and have never completely cleared my history; only removed certain items to prevent it using that data because I didn’t like the content.
That is likely a part of it it’s slowly gotten better over time. I’ve also noticed if I stop watching YouTube for a bit it starts putting those back in. I guess it assumes people will get hooked off the watch then