forced into an echo chamber.

Yes, it does that.

Using YouTube on a new account or through one of the alternatives will result in a wildly different feed. I was recently shocked by seeing the default non-curated feed on YouTube.

Absolutely none of the content was interesting to me; most of it was directly anger inducing political crap or just plain brainrot. I would definitely not visit that shit page ever again if the default feed was my first impression. I don’t know if it’s supposed to be a right wing breeding ground by now, but it sure isn’t as balanced as I would have expected.

My regular YT feed is obviously much more interesting to me, and I can use it to find new content, but since I don’t want to wait for the ads, I now only watch my own subscriptions on a different frontend, which of course will create an even smaller echo chamber.

I get how a curated feed can benefit the user, but YouTube is just not making it possible. It will only show (rage) engaging content and without the dislike function, you can only decide not to watch the crap or get shown more crap until you do like it.