This is the best summary I could come up with:

The change is all part of a “new viewer experience” Google announced on Tuesday.

That means you’ll only see the search bar on the homepage, along with the Shorts, Subscriptions, and Library buttons.

This could come as a welcome change for people who hate sifting through increasingly extreme thumbnails to find the play button, but it could also be a way to annoy users into turning the history back on.

Google says it’s going to roll out this feature “over the next few months,” but several users across the web are already seeing the change.

In place of YouTube’s recommended videos is a notice that reads, “Your watch history is off.

“We are launching this new experience to make it more clear which YouTube features rely on watch history to provide video recommendations and make it more streamlined for those of you who prefer to search rather than browse recommendations,” Google writes.

I’m a bot and I’m open source!

I guess the researchers realized that there’s a greater chance of getting people to turn the data harvesting… sorry, history setting on if there’s a big button, instead of a bunch of obnoxious irrelevant clickbaity thumbnails.