Shorts is the digital content equivalent of cigarettes. I'd love an option to hide shorts forever.

I disagree. There is a lot of good and information dense content on YouTube. Shorts as a format though mostly tends to be dopamine rich garbage.

Agreed. Also stop shoving news channels in my face. Every few weeks/months they come back, usually after some horrific event.

“Welcome to YouTube! Would you like to watch 40 videos on todays slaughter of innocent people?”

No. The answer is always no.

Every time a news channel comes up in recommendations, click the three dots menu on it and choose "do not recommend videos from this channel" (or w/e).

After a short while of doing this the supply of news channels starts drying up, though the algo occasionally attempts to push increasingly unlikely ones on you; just continue mopping them up.

For desktop there is a chrome extension, but no options for the app.

Ironically I'm removing shorts using u-Block origin.