Nothing makes sense. It’s been oversimplified to the point where it’s been dumbed down to its core.
Every iteration is designed to improve some metric so somebody can get promoted. It doesn’t matter if it ruins the overall experience, somebody’s pushing a metric.
This is true for the dumb UI/UX changes in Windows recently too.
There are a lot of idiots out there. It is likely that they are trying to design for them.
What do you mean? What happened? Which Google product?
Do you mean Material Design? It’s getting a lot of hate, but for most apps, I actually really like it. On my computer, I would hate it and I don’t like the Gnome’s simplified design for example, but on my phone, I want most of the apps to be simple utilities and Material Design seems to fit that very well.
I am degoogeled with the exception for YT. Mind to share an example?
Have you tried Newpipe? Lovely YT client for android :)