And not even alphabetical. It's ridiculous.

You should see me or my wife sometimes scrolling down this nine miles long single column list on the Roku to find a particular channel. It's in there, it just could be anywhere in there...

They didn't happen to post any new videos lately so they aren't on the main subscriptions page of latest videos, you have to go to the menu on the left to the list of all subscribed channels and just arrow down forever, back up, down again... Why in the ever loving world isn't that list at least alphabetical?

YouTube is social media first, even if it also happens to be a repository of useful content. Social media does not want you to navigate with agency. They want to choose what you see because it lets them keep you on the platform longer, which is the entire goal.

What's crazy is that their adtech definitely knows how to categorise stuff down to super specific topics, yet they only use that internally.

You can do it by using a feed reader and subscribing to the channels rss feeds. Keeps you better isolated from dark patterns as well.

edit: has the added benefit that there are different feeds for All/Videos/Shorts/Live/Specific Playlists, so this is another way to avoid shorts

PocketTube is great for this.