The problem is if one channel only uploads once a month and another channel uploads twice a day, I will see many videos from the frequent upload channels and might miss the infrequent uploads. If it was just a list of channels with their most recent video I'd see a new thumbnail and know to check that channel for any new videos.
I just unsubscribe from the spam channel because they're producing too much noise. I don't need content producers like that in my life, and making it less obvious that they're adding mostly noise is just disguising the problem, not solving it.
Good for you, but that’s not a solution if you have mixed interests, e.g. you want to get daily entertainment content to choose from and content that is deeper than that. You may not need it, but if you can’t do that anyway it’s indistinguishable from coping.
All I'm saying is that this appears to be an extremely niche use case, and OP's line about YouTube not wanting you to find things from channels you love is over the top. They have a very specific requirement that YouTube hadn't addressed, that's very different than YouTube being designed to prevent you from finding subscriptions.
I don’t think so. Youtube is search, explore and usage hostile for many years. Not sure how one can miss that. “Which channels have new videos” is not niche. They even have it (a blue dot), but either fail to sort or intentionally sort channels seemingly randomly. I’ve missed videos from rare channels too due to this “mechanic”.
You could use an RSS reader to subscrib to the video feeds for the channels where you don't want to miss anything. That's how I used to follow channels I care about (currently none) because I don't want to be subjected to YouTube's algorithms or have to check yet another website.
