I had previously made some notes on UI changes YouTube had undergone in the recent past.

Here are the highlights below:

• Removal of the dislike button
• Mandatory visibility of subscriber count.
• Explosion of the “shorts” feature.
• “Most watched” indicator and other arbitrary metrics for brain dead “meme type” content.
• Removal of the “sort by oldest feature” and replaced with “sort by most popular” (This was curiously re-added by YouTube some months after they took it out)
• Algorithm getting worse by favoring politically charged content Youtube deems “worthy”
• This is an old school thing they removed: No “video reply” feature that adds an element of community. 
• Restructured how the channel “about me” sections operate to encourage pronoun use for channel descriptions (were previously located in another area of the customize channel page. YouTube was clearly moving stuff around trying to optimize this feature).

You can see YouTube is pushing a platform that only is concerned about number of likes, minimal free speech, and meme-related content aimed at shrinking attention spans.