Kind of? It’s more like if all of YouTube functioned like the subscriptions tab. You still have a trending page but it seems to be just the raw “this has gotten X views in Y time” kind of trending. Not the “this is what our Ineffable Algorithm God™©® thinks will maximize the amount of time you spend on our platform” kind. Then you’ve got the subscriptions page which is just chronologically all the videos from the channels you’re subscribed to. But then there’s also the stuff like sponsor block, dearrow, and such.
It’s pretty good what little I’ve used it. It was just a bit of a pain to bring over your my subscriptions at least when I did it on mobile with the NewPipe app. I had to like download my data from Google, find the archive with my subscriptions data and give that to the app so it could find the channels I was subscribed to.
Last I knew, yeah. Google bought them years ago. Moreover, I don’t remember that “feature” being in Waze before Google acquired them. Those ads were the biggest reason I dropped Waze a while back.