> 6 'pages' ... before I saw an actual friend's post

I opened mine, and the first post was from a friend, as were about 75% of the remainder of the posts. The other 25% were from Facegroup groups I joined.

There were zero news stories, and zero AI stuff.

Yeah, this experience could really vary from person to person. I wonder if this person has anyone in their "friends" actually regularly posting? If nobody in their network is posting anything, there's not posts from their network to appear.