I currently use Edge for mostly one thing, its "Read aloud" feature.

Because you can use some of the Azure neural voices its currently the best, free, easily accessible text-to-speech available.

It can even do PDFs quite well. Really helps when I'm too unable to focus for reading long texts but can still listen well enough (ADHD).

Easier said than done. Watching seemingly unrelated things will get you these recommendations anyway. If I had to guess, watching videos that are also watched by the cohort of right-wing-media-watchers will align your algorithm more with that cohort, even if the videos are not right wing media.

There also seems to be no nuance. Watching anything politics aside, watching "Person X's new policy completely debunked" feels like it has the same pull to the right as "Libs triggered by person X's new policy".

I watch a shit ton of YT, try to not watch any rage-bait or similar and I diligently prune my homepage daily with clicking "Not Interested" & "Don't recommend channel". It took a while for these recommendations to creep in, but now that they are here they are relentless. I also feel like it took a miniscule amount of videos, compared to the amount I watch, to cause this change.