I noticed my consumption has decased quite a bit. I would visit regularly to watch content from few channels. I would probably still visit every so often to watch the new videos. But the experience has become more deliberate and conscious. I go to YouTube because I want to go and watch something specific. Mindlessly browsing and watching additional content is harder.
This is good progress from Google to get off their platform :)
I use subscriptions only for a long time and occasionally throw off dead weight there. No need for such a feature to be honest. I get most new interesting channel either by recommendations from youtubers i subscribed to or from random links like on lemmy. Which happens rarely, like, I subscribe to 5 new channels max per year, and remove about the same number each year.