I'm not sure there's anything new under the sun except that they tried pushing decade ol videos. I have one fairly popular video on my channel that dropped to less than a hundred views a day and suddenly it was pushed to a lot of people for a week or two and I got people complaining in the comments about why they are seeing this 16 years old video. Then it went away.
Anyway, it's the reason why I pay extra for music streaming despite having Youtube Music for free together with my Subscription. YouTube for some reason thinks that I want to keep listening the same stuff over and over again.
It's also why I love TikTok. Most of my find on TikTok happen to have a YouTube channel too but for some reason YouTube never bothered to show me any of those. It was for TikTok to let me try something new and drill down from there.
I still like YouTube a lot, it has some very high quality content that shines brightly among the slop that the wider internet has become but YouTube really needs to up its content discovery game.