There's very little productive new ground to grow on if you're working on YouTube.
There's existing glaring site problems, but they're on purpose and ideologically driven (shorts, placebo dislike, subscriptions mean nothing) so no one is going to touch them. It's politically safer and more advantageous to mess with the UI and irritate all the users every couple years.
I assume OP didn't mean that a single overarching ideology was driving all if these changes, but rather that each of them individually is ideologically driven (and therefore immune to questioning). They all seem to be directly counter to the end-user's desires but are off-limits to redesign.
Pretty much what I had intended by that comment, yeah.
YouTube know that the choices they've made are qualitatively bad because users overwhelmingly complained about them (dislike button being the most obvious example of that)
...but quantitatively numbers didn't go down enough to force any kind of retraction or even recognition of discontent, so now we're stuck with the results.
There's very little productive new ground to grow on if you're working on YouTube.
There's existing glaring site problems, but they're on purpose and ideologically driven (shorts, placebo dislike, subscriptions mean nothing) so no one is going to touch them. It's politically safer and more advantageous to mess with the UI and irritate all the users every couple years.