I have completely disabled the history feature, so when I navigate to the homepage there's no "recommended" content. I rely on search exclusively to find what I need. Also I don't have the YouTube app installed, if I need it I just use the browser. This helps minimising the distractions a lot.

As for content, it depends what you're looking for. For me, I'm mostly into maths and physics and there are so many channels and lecture series that were immensely helpful. For example, I recently went through this playlist on Lie Groups [0].

[0] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLN_4R2IuNuuRgJb00X2J53Iq9...