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On the website on a desktop, the shorts section has an X on the top right of its section. That should hide shorts for a few days. It says 30 days but I'm not convinced.
You can click the options on any video to say you aren't interested in that video or that channel.
You can delete videos from your watch history if your algorithm gets tainted. Like my nephew was watching a bunch of train videos on my TV. So algo started sending me all these train recommendations. I just deleted them from my watch history and haven't seen a train video since.
uBlock origin can block most annoying elements from the YouTube website.
This website has some useful filters for YouTube and other websites, for instance hiding already watched videos, shorts community posts etc. https://letsblock.it/filters