Thanks a lot for your super quick response KTR, highly appreciated mate!
I realised the second one was part of this network also based on their channel "friends". Yet it amazed me how quickly YT started to promote them, really just a few weeks into their existence.
Another example - this one took longer than 2 weeks, may be 4 weeks but now flying: UC96TwRI_I8Xi8g96CzIgR6Q
I followed it since they had 3-4 videos. They came up on my suggested videos when they had 40 views per video, so definitely no network/traffic redirection.