I work with YouTube for my job and I'm happy to announce that I found a remedy for the extremely distracting landing page. It's a Chrome extension called redirector that lets you add redirect rules to the browser by hand.

Whenever you'd go to the YouTube landing page it'll redirect you to another page. In my case, I make it go to my YouTube subscriptions. Those are way less distracting and typically show me stuff that I've already seen anyway. Much better!