I really don't know how it works, but I haven't been logged into youtube for at least a decade. Sometimes it recommends some neat things, but it likes to throw curveballs at me sometimes. Sometimes I'm watching it in bed and I fall asleep and wake up to conspiracy theory stuff because I was watching history. Kind of annoying.
Opening youtube in a private tab to see the base experience is about what you'd expect- just normal people stuff like MrBeast or world news and sometimes surface-level 2D stuff like whatever the big anime of the moment happens to be. The good news is that at least at the beginning it doesn't feed you outrage content, but maybe that's it being purposely deceptive.

I think if they can place a backlink from where you came from and then have identifying traits of people coming from that backlink then they can knbow what to recommend to you from there. Which would explain your results.