Sure, but I'm talking about specifically non-evergreen videos like 10 year old product previews. That's what has cropped up recently. Youtube used to be pretty good about recommending old evergreen content but not time-sensitive content.
Something could have happened like… (just making this up) the 20 year anniversary of the G4 cube comes around and .0000001% of their users (add a few zeroes if needed) go and watch every single cube product review, so the algorithm thinks “oh everyone is into old product reviews now!” Because one of those people DID click on a bunch of other product reviews for whatever reason… more nostalgia or he thought the reviewer was cute or he walked away and they kept auto playing… or whatever.
