Is youtube's UI dev team trying to make the app worse?

I'm using mobile, and for the past few years things have been getting worse, and worse. It started with removing the dislike counter, and now it's onto the new gestures system, and the mini player becoming a trashy picture in picture window. I use gestures on my phone, and I can't press the home button without either restarting the video, or skipping to the next one. These changes come with negative feedback nearly everytime, and are notoriously unpopular, but for some reason we keep moving foward making the app less, and less usable. The only thing I can think of is that they're doing this on purpose.