I'm a paying YouTube Premium customer, but YouTube is getting worse every day. I especially dislike the over-the-top thumbnails that some creators use, often showing their surprised faces reacting to something incredible that never occurs in the video. The many “news reaction” videos are almost as bad, wherein creators pad 10 seconds of a real news clip with 3 minutes of blabbering; the thumbnail shows the real news clip.
The race to the bottom of the brain stem, as Tristan Harris puts it, continues.
For those who feel similarly, I recommend the Clickbait Remover add-on (get it for Firefox, get it for Chrome), which replaces custom thumbnails with real video frames.