How YouTube Shorts get me is that I will navigate to one from a link someone posts, or a search hit, and (if I'm not on guard), 10-30 minutes later I will realize I've been in shorts-scrolling zombie mode.
And IME video shorts almost never have any value beyond: (1) mindless junk food; or (2) awareness of what other people are seeing.
So I'm going to try just blocking YouTube Shorts entirely, by URL.