I can confirm this. I saw a lot of region-based, really stereotyping videos when I got a new computer and visited YouTube. While I understand they need to fill up the home page with something, I just prefer they can be a little more creative about the whole thing.

After glancing through the top few, I quickly went for the search box. To their credit, once I do a few searches, the recommendations drastically improved when visiting next time.

A side effect of this, of course, is that you can study all kinds of stereotyping and biases by repeating my experiment in various regions I suppose.