I've had YouTube shorts hidden for a pretty long time (using unhook), but before doing that I did give them a shot, and honestly I think that it is scary how easily it is to distract us for hours at a time with these short videos that we will most likely forget as soon as we swipe to the next one. Sure some of them are really good and have stuck with me, but the vast majority (at least to me) just seems like low effort slop created with the sole purpose to "watch big number go up".
I didn't really get to experience this on Instagram (or any other platform really), because as soon as they started to inject random content from people I wasn't following into my feed i bounced out and uninstalled the app. Like you said, big social media companies make it so easy for end users to just swipe/scroll endlessly, and I also have been saying that they also make it look like they are the only options, they make it look like you will be missing out on soooo much cool stuff if you quit, but lets be honest for a second, if we forget about all of this "cool" content as soon as the next post materializes in front of our eyes are we really missing out if we chose to not see it in the first place? At least that's how I've been thinking about it, and I found myself happier, more productive and more aware of myself and my surroundings with each platform that I left.
Besides a couple of forums that I check semi-regularly, the only social media that I still use is YouTube, and even that is heavily cut down (again thanks to unhook), like you said there is some good to all of this, and there are some genuinely talented people making good short form content, but as it stands, I am not willing to waste so much of my time filtering trough 99% sensationalist slop.
I've personally never uploaded short form content, but even then the impact that these platforms had on me was mostly negative, so I actively choose to stay away from it. I also don't have anything against people that do upload to these platforms, but I also don't see them as viable mediums either in the long run, shorts, reels, whatever else they are called on other social media websites, they were all created to make the users spend more time on their respective websites/apps and make more money to the respective parent companies, and it is no secret that these companies don't care about the users and they'll jump on any opportunity they have to profit off our time and attention.
I'm sorry if I rambled for way to long, I might even seem a bit extreme, but having been online for most of my life and having seen these platforms grow and morph into something so devoid of humanity and soul that I decided to just step away from them. I might have officially reached "old person" status in my early 20s because of all of this as I find myself thinking "I miss how it used to be" more often.