Gregory's Server@mcc I think you can shut it off.
YouTube / Profile / Settings / Playback and Performance.
In the Browsing category, there's an option for Video Previews. You can toggle it off.
No joke - that toggle has never worked for me except when I was about to write a snarky post about it.
Hopefully, it works for everyone else.
@vegetarianzombie @mcc it works for me, but there was a period of about 2 months where it would re-enable itself every week or so.
I wouldn't go so far as to say it was intentional, but it definitely felt like a low priority bug (as opposed to if it kept DISabling itself)