Comment by watermelonpuppy

If you would like to keep the native youtube.com experience, in addition to disabling the watch history, which gets rid of the first screen recommendations, you can also use a filter list such as https://github.com/DandelionSprout/adfilt/blob/master/YouTub....

I use it with AdGuard and it not only blocks the side cards of video recommendations on what to watch next, it also blocks comments which can be an endless pit of doomscrolling on its own.

This way if you want to watch a video the only way to do so its to search for it, otherwise you won't ever get anything else recommended to you.