I suspect that the managers in charge of some of these features are lobbying for it as a way to artificially increase the engagement stats for their features, but spinning it as actually being good UX instead of a user-hostile move because it's important for "discoverability" or something like that.
Then it was "hide shorts for X days" (I think 30?).
Now it is "show fewer shorts".
Like a relative commentor said -- a product manager on the "Shorts" team is doing a helluva job boosting their team's stats.
Lately the option to disable ambient lighting around video has been reseting to ON for me on every video I open.
I cant even formulate how I feel about that without breaking some rules somewhere