First of all it was misleading: people with 300 or even 500 friends have nowhere newer 1500 posts a day. Sure, some friends post 10 memes a day, but most people do not post anything at all. In any case, I did not hear anyone complaining that they had to deal with too many posts, and managing the feed wasn't an issue. No-one was complaining about the chronological feed before,
What was an issue, however, was that Facebook (and now Instagram - also owned by Facebook) needed to make more money. So they created an algorithmic feed that pushed posts that engaged people more to keep people on the platform. I suspect this is exactly the same tactic, by the same people, backed up by the same compliant media, that we have seen before.