Curious: Are you looking at the local/federated timeline, or just the people you follow?

I strongly urge you to stick to the latter.

I get nothing like what you describe, but I ensure the local/federated timeline stays out of my feed.

I also just read the timeline of followed accounts, and even a list of 'must-reads' for the high-value people, but I'm also aware that this isn't the way other people liked to use Twitter/Mastodon.

Maybe that's why this discussion is so split between "I read my follows and love it" || "I read the open feeds and hate the stream of trash"

Not sure what can be done when there's such an adversarial environment for open social media - everything you need for a federated environment can be misused by bad actors or neglected by naive well-intentioned ones :/