Comment by acaloiar

Those who disable watch history probably know this, but others probably don't -- when you disable watch history your "subscriptions" page effectively becomes your home page. And on your subscriptions page, shorts cannot be removed like on the actual home page. So if you disable watch history, you implicitly must enable shorts.

Like a relative commentor said -- a product manager on the "Shorts" team is doing a helluva job boosting their team's stats.