I tightly curated my feeds to stick to trusted sources on specific topics. The most "controversial" topic in my feed might be how to cook certain things certain ways or maybe business analysis. The rest of my topics are known, trustworthy primary sources for things such as software, electrical, and mechanical engineering, culinary science and techniques.

There's also a bunch of "how to more efficiently do [thing that I already do] with [system I already use/own]." It's pretty difficult to get suckered into misinformation on techniques for automatic code generation in C# or how to cook a carbonara sauce from the author whose books I already own.

Something that really helps is never clicking on anything like "I should have bought this years ago" or any similar shit. I realize that I might be missing out on things that would actually make a certain task easier. But if it's really life changing, I'm sure one of my trusted sources, online or otherwise, will get around to suggesting it to me.

Staying away from talking heads, even ones I like, goes a very long way to preventing blatant bullshit ever getting suggested. I click quite often on "don't suggest again." It's a chunk of effort up front, but then it's a small amount of maintenance from there.

I usually use YouTube for videos and Lemmy/masto for discussion

I don’t read through nor comment on youtube videos at all. I just watch what I want/need to watch and close the window after. It’s not a good place or format for proper discussion so it’s never going to be a good experience. A proper place for discussion would be forum type formats with nested threads, like here on Lemmy. If you are still willing to read reddit comments instead, there’s a browser extension that replaces youtube comments with reddit comments. I don’t know how it works because I haven’t tried it myself, but that’s an option.

I don't comment on YouTube videos and that solves the issue for me. The comments are often crap anyways. So I don't think I'm missing out on anything.

I rarely use YouTube as a source of information, it's a source of entertainment like 95% of the time for me and most of the rest is stuff like natural science documentations, which isn't really subject to the kinds of issues you describe.

Strictly from a viewer's perspective, I use a YouTube client alternative (like GrayJay, Freetube, NewPipe) and subscribe only to the channels I want to see content from. Then I can look at video suggestions for given videos to see relevant content. This entirely removes me from the algorithm as well as any personalization that would put me in an echo chamber. I also branch out to reliable and unbiased news sources, better search engine alternatives, and so on.

Nowadays you comment on something, and there’s a 75% chance of you being shadowbanned without knowing why

I don't comment on YouTube, so commenting doesn't affect me. I have no idea whether it's a problem or not, but it's not one that I'll run into.

I rarely read comments on YouTube.

I don't have an account on YouTube.

forcing feuds to take place not in comments but in back and forth videos

I rarely watch videos of people talking about to each other, as I've no interest in the drama side of this (or on Twitter or similar). The very small handful of times where I've watched videos with disagreeing takes, it's been pretty respectful.

means anyone can use it as a platform to slander any person or topic completely unchallenged

Frankly, I don't think that this is a huge issue. The concept of "nobody can say false things or I will go to the government to have their statement examined by a court and potentially blocked", whether one agrees with it or not, becomes impractical in the Internet era, YouTube or no; publishing is no longer a local matter. Every individual has easy access to global reach. Laws on acceptable speech don't generally span jurisdictions (and it's probably a good thing too; I doubt that most people reading this would be happy about being subject to blasphemy law in some countries, for example). There is no entity with a monopoly over speech acting as an arbiter of truth Internet-wide. There is an absolutely immense amount of incorrect information accessible on the Internet. I think that the expectation is best placed on the consumer of information to take into account that some information out there is wrong, rather than taking it to some country's courts.

Not using YouTube