It's definitely a shift in what content is popular and trendy, with a side of Youtube aggressively pushing content that is...family friendly? I initially wanted to say "for kids", but that's not accurate. "Appeals to kids without explicitly being made for them" is the general kind of content that does well at the moment, in any case.

Safe, nonaggressive, flashy without much substance. That's a lot of the trending material at the moment, and that's how Youtube wants it. They killed off animation, and drove away gaming content to Twitch (and are now trying to reel it back with their own streaming options; it's working apparently), so those are out. Skits do about as well as they used to, but many have moved to Shorts now with varying levels of success.

That leaves weird stuff like "stream highlights" that exist to just push people toward the Twitch account of the streamer in question, video essays (which got a big boom recently due to some wrinkle in the algorithm and nobody is sure why longform content is suddenly favored again), and "influencer" content, because children are easily...influenced.