Yes, they've removed another feature—just like they did with collections and the dislike counter.
Why does this keep happening?
I don't understand how you can remove something without offering a replacement. When developers change things, you expect them to at least keep the old functionality. Even if they want to simplify the interface by removing text and the link to the trending page, they could have just hidden it out of sight. That's always an option.
Could the reason for this removal be the computational cost of generating trends? As we remember, the trending page simply contained videos sorted by view count over a short period. This doesn't require AI; the maintenance cost is practically zero, especially since the necessary statistics are already being used for other features.
The main reason, I suspect, is simply because they can. In large companies, poor decisions are often made due to management issues and a lack of user feedback. But when a large company has a monopoly, the situation becomes much worse.
So, what can be done?
Let's take a closer look at the "trending" function. Was it really about global trends? Not exactly. If you changed your country in the settings, you would get completely different trends for each region. YouTube's trends showcased videos gaining a lot of views quickly, but the selection was also personalized to some degree.
You never had full control over how those videos were related to you. However, you can create your own trends through your subscriptions.
For example, the Channel groups and rating browser extension allows you to filter your subscriptions by view count. If you subscribe to channels that matter to you, you can use this filter to see which of their videos are getting the most traction—effectively creating a personalized trending feed.
YouTube provides an opportunity for many professionals to earn money, but not all of them know how to make quality sound, and some of them even did not intend to do anything for other users. Also, some people shoot videos as a memory album, while others use YouTube to broadcast to several people at once, not for the sake of views from outsiders. Not all users understand what video access settings mean, so such videos can be seen by anyone who wants to through YouTube search.
Many authors do not see problems with poor quality, they often differ little from ordinary users, so it is easier to take measures to improve the sound yourself.
To automatically increase the sound level, you can use the Chrome extension Channel groups and rating.
This way you can automatically normalize the sound by increasing it by 60 decibels (1000 times) using the "Normalize" checkbox.
Normalization is useful even when the sound changes almost instantly, so you can hear a conversation with a distant interlocutor, and videos with cats are filled with especially distinct purring after normalization.
These settings will apply to all videos on YouTube if you check the "Apply globally" checkbox and click apply.
But the problem is more complex than just normalizing the sound. Normalization will inevitably change the sound, but this is not acceptable for any sound, so for YouTube it is better to change the sound only for non-musical videos. Music is better to listen to without distortion.
This extension allows you to create a group for music videos and apply different volume settings to it than to other videos.
You can configure both sound normalization and many other effects, so this extension solves many problems.
Once configured, you can always restore these settings if you synchronized it.
These settings will apply to all videos on YouTube if you check the "Apply globally" checkbox and click apply.
I also noticed that short videos on YouTube change quickly and it is inconvenient to change the volume for each of them, so this function is even more useful for short videos.
Some videos are so quiet that without this function you can't hear anything at all.
I even sometimes upload videos taken on a phone just to hear the normalized sound that I can't normalize in other ways.