I mean even if you pay for premium, they don’t give you the option to not have shorts shoved down your throat. This is a “feature” that has been added after premium was a thing. It’s also not too hard to figure out shorts are an optimized method to harvest more user data on interests.
While I don’t disagree with leaving the ad-funded internet behind us, I also don’t trust Google to be a pioneer in reducing ads on the Internet— considering they’re an ad delivering company above all else at this point.
Clover would be a good option, it’s more resistant to burning from dog urine than most grasses. It wasn’t that long ago since clover was included with standard lawn seed mixes.