I watch YouTube without logging in. The quality of recommendations I get is pretty good. I would say that I get very different recommendations on different browsers at different times so your mileage may vary.
2. Search. YT search is ... reasonable. Not great, but it typically turns up what you want.
3. Incognito mode *ONLY*.
4. Invidious, if at all possible.
5. Watch, or more often, listen, through a third-party client. I generally "experience" YouTube via mpv. I'll cue up a list of URLs I'm interested in. This is the most effective and convenient way of curating a playlist I'm aware of. VLC can also play YT video directly. (Both support many, many, many other sites and formats, typically through yt-dlp or youtube-dl).
6. When using the YT client itself, disable comments and suggestions through a CSS manager, or uBlock Origin's "block element" feature.
Benefits:
- No ads
- No idiotic recommendations
- No tracking and pigeonholing
- No comments (excepting Invidious, though that offers the option of YT or Reddit comments should you prefer)
Actually, I HATE youtube search. Any search engine that changes and reorders responses when I click back to it drives me up a wall.
I infrequently use youtube (maybe 2-3 videos a month) and because the search sucks so badly, I never search using youtube, but rather with Kagi or DDG video search.
What I do know is that I can plug in terms and filters (typically dates / video length) to turn up something relevant most of the time.
Given that most of my searches are for lecture / podcast type material, that tends to work reasonably well for me.
Recent/current major news is of course a shitshow, though it can occasionally be useful. Increasingly I turn to major journalism channels for that information simply because the chumming around no-name submissions is so abysmally bad.
