Tags are dead — but the field still hurts you

Tags are dead — but the field still hurts you
Word is video tags carry almost no ranking weight anymore, yet creators are reporting that stuffing irrelevant high-volume tags can still mislead the early audience-targeting and earn you a worse first-impression cohort. A source: tags can't help you, but they can still confuse the match.
For a channel like yours:
— stop tag-stuffing for volume; you're potentially buying the wrong viewers
— a handful of genuinely accurate tags or none beats 30 aspirational ones
— put the energy into title, thumbnail, and the spoken first line where signal actually lives
Confidence: medium-high. Tags-are-dead is near-consensus; the active-harm angle is the contested part.