I feel you. Started a Channel 3 Month ago - mostly what kills the videos is the clickrate. Retantion somehow is important but more than 70% doesnt favour you at all. Most of my shorts got 130% viewtime. But was shown in the feed of 14K people but only 5k views. So the algorithm killed the videos.
Thumbnails are basically the most important part.
The dislike and weird comments are pretty normal. It‘s humans :D
Got 130 Subs after 32 Videos - keep it up 💪🏻