If one wanted an honest sample of it, where would one go? I dont want to chance the most popular ones or the ones youtube itself recommends.
Like is it Ren and Stimpy bad or Rocko's modern life bad, or just really weird like sesame street parody bad?
"Elsagate" videos are their own category of bad. The concept is that you exploit the fact that the Youtube Kids app doesn't give you any choice of the "next video", it's entirely auto-play, which is meant to "safely" to keep kids out of the nastier Youtube content. So the "audience" is actually the algorithm and the quality of the content doesn't even matter. "Youtube Kids" is what parents plop their toddler in front of so that stuff is flashing on the screen. Since the algorithm is the actual audience their trying to please, the content tends to be very repetitive and samey.
There are a few "formulas" found to work to game the algorithm, and "elsagate" type videos are one of the most well-known ones, however there are others. type "elsa and" into google and the auto-complete is "elsa and spiderman". That's a good way to sample this content, precisely
because this is content that games the recommendation system itself. Picked at random:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6D_e2fbMcpcTry and bear with it for a minute or two, then note this has
32 million views, and the first official Captain Marvel trailer only managed 58 million view. And note that this ElsaGate video had age-restrictions put on it as part of the general crackdown on this material, or it would probably be at 100 million views by now. Then note that this elsagate video only has 4800+ comments compared to 158000+ on the Captain Marvel trailer. That is because most of the views come from the kid's app, not the normal youtube. From the total views you can see why this sort of cheap content was so lucrative.
this video is a good example of how Elsagate works. Royalty free music over a video of some people wearing cheap cosplays of the same set of Marvel / DC / Disney characters and fooling around. And the title is the incomprehensible "Spiderman & Frozen Elsa TROLLEY CRASH! w/ Maleficent Joker Disney Princess Anna Toys! Superhero IRL" which is loaded with keywords to grab views from the next-video-for-kids algorithm. Note, that even though these videos are made by very diverse groups they almost always feature identical casts, because the casts are determined by (1) what cheap cosplays are available and (2) by the algorithm, which is a self-reinforcing selection mechanism: the more elsa-gate videos feature the same cast, the more those search-terms get selected for.
There was even one of those inane "pranks" channels where the edgelord creators go and race-bait black guys with the n-word then whine "it's a prank!" when the black guys try and beat them up. Then, one day they turned into an Elsagate channel, without even bothering to rebrand or anything. Subscribers tuned in one day expecting edgy asshole pranks, and were treated to something like the above video, and were like "yo wtf".
Some of the elsagate videos are "sexier" than others, e.g. some have better looking girls in sexier cosplay, innuendo etc, but nothing worse than you'd see on free to air TV anyway if you were a kid growing up. If you were a kid at home and there was nothing on and you flicked to Days of Our Lives, you'd get more lewd content than the lewdest Elsagate video. Hell, re-runs of I Dream of Jeannie are a hell of a lot more lewd than these videos, and they used to play that at about 4pm in the afternoon when I was in school.
Also, the issue is that they can ban specific iterations of it, but the basic concept is the same: there are various 'formulas' for gaming the autoplay system, which leads to everyone being channeled in junk content on Youtube Kids. Sure, the few "disturbing" videos that happen to appear in their from time to time are worrying, but the core problem that your kid is watching hours of absolute mindless trash is actually a bigger problem than the fact that in e.g. one video you can see elsa's cleavage. Kids often don't even pick up that stuff: innuendo goes right over their heads. It's the parents who get offended, not the kids who get disturbed by it.