Not sure when they will take it away, but for now, there is a cleaner option - go to Feeds on the left (I use it on the computer), and then Friends (as opposed to All or Groups). That gets you the latest posts from friends in reverse chronological order.

Oh wow I actually forgot about this.

I used to have a bookmark that took me directly to the friends feed but it would seem it just redirects to the homepage now, and the navigating to the feeds fresh just loads within the page rather than via URL (at least on mobile web, m.facebook.com, not checked desktop)

Honestly it feels like a hostage situation

Like some engineer in the company begged Mark like, "Please, people are going to drop your product completely unless you give them some control" (remember Top Stories vs Most Recent?)

And Mark's like "yeah, ok, cool" (it'll be removed in 2 years when said engineer quits/is fired)