The shorts are terrible, whereas my 'normal' home page is a combination of informative/hobby/tech related content and background music, the shorts are a bunch of useless crap that eat my time like nothing else without giving anything in return (apart from triggering of my reward systems I guess).

I just delete them from my homepage and they stay away for 30 days. If they return I only notice it because they sneakily start eating my attention again. Maybe there's a setting that doesn't make them return.