Their recommendation engine feels very naive, you’re in a cohort based on the genre of films you watch, a that’s pretty much it (I’m sure there is more details in practice but they don’t matter if the recommendations I get feel as dumb as just using the genre)
Their actual goal is probably closer to maximizing the ads you see while minimizing 3rd-party content licensing costs and operating costs, especially if they can calculate how to keep you paying a monthly subscription cost (you are, right?).
Bonus if they can increase the ratio of `watched_netflix_content / watched_content` to juice up share value. Maybe they know exactly what you'd like, but it's never available, because Netflix doesn't want to pay the license fees to the non-Netflix rightsholders, because that cuts into Netflix's margin.