Because YouTube employs an evil recommendation system that is designed to maximize your screen time, even if this results into addiction. There are much better and more ethical alternatives, at least for some kind of videos.

I’m having a good time with nebula for educational videos. It’s not great, but it’s good enough and it’s very reasonably priced.

I dunno, I honestly think their sacred algorithm needs work.

Here's a dead simple suggestion that would help increase viewing time for me at least; if I queue up X number of different videos, don't just base autoplayed video suggestions on the last one. Look behind and base it on the other videos too. That would make for much more diverse viewing instead of just falling asleep to the same topic/channel over and over.

My point is not on how well it performs, but more on the fact that it is designed and tuned to maximise the screen time, which results in very unpleasant effect on young and children.

And to my view, when you are the largest player, by far the one with the biggest market share and you exploit children weaknesses to make some more money, well, then you are the lowest form of life on earth.