Some of the “duplicate” questions that I have seen on Stack Overflow are phrased entirely different than the supposedly “original” one. It’s like they expect me to brute-force their entire fucking search index before publishing a new question. I don’t have that much patience or time.
I disabled shorts everywhere. Before I saw your post, I couldn’t even recall YouTube having shorts.
Also, Google tracks your everything, not just your YouTube history. You likely use Google Search a lot for adult content. Even a VPN and browsing on incognito mode might not save you. They have lots of ways track you.