I’m a Premium subscriber as well. In theory, they have nothing to gain from pushing shorts on me or increasing my engagement. It should be all about making the user happy. Yet paying users seem to have to deal with these decisions that are driven by ad-funded users.
I tend to want videos that are about 4 minutes long (what used to be the norm). Now it seems like most of the videos recommended to me are 10-60 minutes long, with the average one being 15-20 minutes. When I’m looking for something shorter it seems like Shorts are the only option. However those are usually either too short, or too long to be in the Shorts format without having control over the video on the TV.
Their perverted incentive structures created this mess. They should just have the one normal format for videos, have auto-play that people can opt-in to if they’re into that, and let people making videos of whatever length is best for the content without forcing videos to either be artificially long or short in an effort to optimize for the monetization algorithm.