But what if I want a faster horse?

All the result of A/B tests. Everything will converge to give you an engaging experience for most people. The only not too bad student is reddit which lets you keep using their older UI if you want to. But everything else is pushing new driven by A/B tests UI optimized for engagement.

My hunch is these algos are also optimized for hiding the long tail of content that's more expensive to serve as it's not edge-cached. And it was the long tail that drew many of us to these services in the first place. At least that's my feeling using Youtube and Netflix these days.

I don't think it's about expense, it's more about hiding the fact that their catalogue is actually really small. They can't let you narrow your search at all because then they wouldn't have any content to give you.

Think how many times you've searched for a specific film and it says "Content related to <thing that you actually wanted>".