If you like to sign in and like, comment on stuff and enjoy normal YouTube experience then YouTube Vanced can be used. Afaik it lets users sign in and do what the original app from Google does.
As the other user pointed out, if you do not want to sign in, you can use newpipe from f-droid. Also, on web-browser, you can use https://invidio.us instance.
That's why I use Firefox. Though I rarely use YouTube anyway. I just don't like this conflict of interest. It's bad enough that Mozilla is dependent on Google for income.
while on the topic of YouTube results, is there any way to limit search to actually output... search results? At this point it's like 8 search results followed by twenty videos of "You may also like.." and "You have already watched...".
Do you make regular use of the "Not Interested" button when new recommendations are shown? That might be why.
I do this, and if the recommended video has even a hint of "Youtube optimization", e.g. yelling face or all-caps clickbaity title, I click "Do not Recommend Channel".
The problem is that YT then starts recommending an endless number of clips from stuff I haven't explicitly blocked (say Simpsons or 30 Rock clips). And eventually that starts getting annoying too, so I end up hitting "not interested".
The cycle starts all over again when I manually search for a clip from one of those shows.
I'm using YouTube Premium and I also have the same repetitive recommendations. It also won't stop recommending me something on my homepage unless I click "do not show" or finally relent and click the video recommendation.
At a first glance, its functionality looks like something that could be implemented through {Grease,Tamper}Monkey script. It provides so much more transparency over the extension model and I wish more folks make use of it.
Because "click once to install" has fewer prerequisites, and requires less effort and sophistication, which is important for sharing software with those less savvy (or just plain tired).
Chrome extension to remove YouTube recommendations, comments, and more so you don't go down the rabbit hole again!
https://github.com/anthonyftwang/youtube-rabbit-hole