I’ve been on the hunt for an ELI5 guide to make this happen

Since Windows ME, a system update was always a risk. You never know when some BS like this might happen. It taught me at a young age to turn off automatic updates and only update when necessary and ready to do some troubleshooting.

I was frustrated by this also and decided not to put the effort into rooting the device to get rid of all that crap. Instead I decided to use Flauncher together with Button Mapper. Using that tool, I map the homepage button on the remote to point to Flauncher. It isn’t a perfect solution but it was done in a few minutes and I can now mostly avoid the bullshit ads

To expand on this, I have witnessed small, indie channels have their content copied, processed through AI so it is stripped of audio, watermarks and re-edited. Then it is posted as a new video. When it is reported as a fake, or pirated copy, or not original content, Google then puts the burden of proof on the small indie channel that originally created the content, often requiring them to lawyer up and file a legal complaint, before they will take any action to remove the AI slop. It is fucking absurd. It would only take a real person about 60 seconds to compare the content and dates to determine who is the theif.

I like notebooks like OneNote, Obsidian, etc for this purpose. I can keep things organized, broswer plugins to send direct to the notebook and even save a PDF or screenshot of the page if I want to.