I've pressed the "X" on those damn things like a dozen times, and even said "yes" to the modal asking me if I was sure I wanted to hide them. Yet they still appear. The default selection also uses the most transparently sexualized thumbnails with BOOBS! just begging me to click. Admittedly, I sometimes do - not for the boobs, but for the comments which inevitably make jokes about the boobs in the thumbnail.
I find that shorts pretty regularly suggest content I would like and it seems to largely depend on what I watch even outside of shorts. Ie when I watch a lot of dancing videos I get a lot of Shorts feed containing that, same with Korean or Japanese content.
That's definitely not the case for me, unfortunately. It seems like the selection of Shorts presented to me on the homepage has never evolved past its default content recommendations. Maybe I opted out of something at some point and they can't use my watch history for Shorts suggestions.
