EDIT: I have my YouTube history off for years. However, I still had the home feature but based only in subscriptions, likes and dislikes. It was a crap, and was crap in the time I had history on too. Recently, YouTube removed the home feature for me and made that.
They sell this crap feature, that basically serves only to sponsor right wing media for no reason, as if it was a greate and modern feature, and as if it was worth enough to give Google the commercial right to my activity on YouTube. This shit is so useless that I am using only the subscriptions tab with PocketTube, since the default one is also crap.
I have the same experience. I police my algorithm aggressively to the point where I can immediately tell if they’ve made adjustments to it. I’ve blocked american sports channels repeatedly over the last couple years, for example. Youtube shorts contain the highest ratio of right-wing rage bait. Despite never, ever engaging with these videos and actively downvoting and blocking these creators outright, right-wing rage politics are regularly injected into my recommendations, a feed that is mostly focused on music, games, science and technology.