While I overall agree, I ironically find the search engine on YouTube to be somewhat limiting when I'm looking for specific and/or fresh things...
For example, I wanted to watch a bunch of videos of Mark Zuckerberg speaking from before 2010 and the YouTube search engine only showed me a limited amount of things I had already watched— it even had unrelated suggestions below those results based on my viewing habits.
So I went to Google and searched for videos and interviews of Zuck and found a bunch which were not easily surfaced on YouTube itself.
Same thing with Ina Garten/Barefoot Contessa cooking videos.
Now that I've found some fresh videos, the homepage recommendation algorithm has gotten better at surfacing new content related to these topics.