And, as far as I can understand, it will disengage itself from "latest first" as soon as it detects you are not addicted enough to not miss every new update with it engaged, thus having zero echo-cancelling powers.

Maybe it’s because houseplants aren’t a controversial topic. Take any topic where people hold strong opinions (politics, religion, ...) and start following people you agree with. I guarantee you’ll have to very deliberately look for people on the other end of the spectrum at some point because your feed and your follow recommendations will indeed be an echo chamber.

If it only were that well. In reality, when I follow people who posts on various niche subjects, it turns out the algorithm believes I'm mostly interested in American Politics because quite a few of those posters are into that and that overshadows all the niche subjects.

Looking at the list of things Twitter believes I'm interested in is quite enlightening about the limits of recommendation engines.

I think the proper analogy is a bookstore whose titles rearrange themselves on the shelves based on your liminal reactions to the covers.