It's like a subtle admission that these platforms are on their way out and they're throwing their own Barnum & Bailey circus just to keep anyone around.
That, along with the fact that Twitter now censors its search results, are the main reasons I stopped donating content to the platform and deleted my account after 12 years.
But you're right in that the changing-back behaviour was there some months ago. I don't know if they gave up this user-hostile behaviour or if they segment the user base in several groups and I'm lucky.
On the late little-lamented Google+, a set of features converged to give this option:
- It was possible to define what profiles could comment on one's own posts, or whose notifications would be visible. I simply piled all my contacts into two lists ("Circles") called "notifications" and "comments". If someone abused that privilege, they were removed.
- The default Home stream could include "featured" or "recommended" content. Individual lists could not. Obvious hack: don't look at the Home stream, and instead have a primary list. On desktop, I further hacked the CSS to remove any references to streams I wasn't interested in following, e.g., the short-lived "Games" category, and "What's Hot" (an absolute cesspit of anodyne irrelevance).
- On successor platforms, I typically set up about three lists in order of priority, often literally "A", "B", and "C". The highest-quality (and lowest-volume) posters go in A, spillover to B, and especially annoying / high-volume to C. If a profile's contributions are not useful, they're unfollowed.
- Block early and often. Where merely unfollowing isn't enough. https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/104371585950783019
- Mastodon has the additional feature of being able to block an entire instance. For large instances (tens to hundreds of thousands of accounts) this may be overkill. For smaller ones with hostile cultures, it's quite handy.
I'll note: HN has none of these features, but it has excellent moderation, and the option of collapsing annoying threads. If I find myself conversing with someone to whom my meagre skills in communication seem utterly inadequate, I collapse the thread and move on. HN preserves those collapsed states (at times this is an antifeature, here, it's useful).
This isn't quite as powerful as the block-user feature, but in the context of HN's other controls, it's generally sufficient.
If you don't mute conversations as soon as they become boring, your notifications get filled with junk.