I have been using this site for years, and I simply do not remember a time when notifications worked properly. Some new videos appear in my list, but I'd say about 80% do not. I have tried turning them off and on multiple times. Of course the stupid ones telling me about the "top trending videos" always appear, when I don't care in the slightest about what's trending.
This is simply unacceptable, and do not try to tell me it's a big issue to fix. I'm a senior software engineer, I know that it's not a difficult fix, unless your codebase was written by a drunk monkey.
Stop making excuses and fix it. This is ridiculous.