> I hope Twitter makes a ‘retro’ mode where I can just see the actual tweets of only the people I follow in semi-chronological order. With the option to turn off retweets for certain users.

I think both of these exist? There's a way to turn off retweets for particular users (it's in the same menu you'd use to mute or block someone) and there's an option to show a plain timeline (uncheck "show the best tweets first").

The plain timeline option doesn't seem to consistently work on the mobile app, but many (most? all?) alternative Twitter clients show you the plain timeline.