What if the content is good, but the titles and thumbnails are just annoying?

...and not because the creators want to make clickbait titles and OTT thumbnails, but because that's what everyone else clicks on, and is therefore what The Algorithm boosts, so that's what they all need to chase.

Report those posts for misleading title / thumbnail

Incentives are misaligned here. Regardless of reporting, YouTube will likely continue to prioritize engaging title/thumbnail combinations because they prioritize engagement.

A third-party database that provides descriptive titles does not have this incentive, but instead benefits from being qualitatively distinct from the OG YouTube experience. (Otherwise, why would people use the extension?)

But have you considered the impact to /equity/ on the platform?

Instead, they removed the dislike count (for viewers).

Not exactly. It did exist, and creators can see the actual count, but otherwise the dislike count isn’t sent by the API anymore. What’s actually going on is those browser plugins are recording the number of dislikes themselves and inferring the number.

Sounds like a good use case for a Kalman filter.

You can mark a video as bad if you are a rightholder or a censour from enough powerful state. So, users would not see the bad video any more.