Once upon a time, I was in condensed matter physics. I was (and remain) interested in a very specific niche within that, and I read a small handful of the papers that were published each week. I’m not actively researching or publishing anymore so I cap this to one or two per month now, and mostly scan over them to see if anything piques my interest.
I was still interested in condensed matter as a whole, at the time, and attended group seminars once a month to see what other people were currently excited about - there wasn’t any hope of me reading a cross section of all condensed matter papers because there is far more published per week than I’d be physically able to even glimpse at, and most of it is stuff I don’t understand or particularly care about.
I was likewise interested in physics as a whole, and twice a year I’d attend a departmental seminar and see what people in the entire department were interested in. Most was far over my head, but it still directed me to a small handful of papers that I’d read for the hell of it. Of course, I couldn’t do this without first hearing people review the research. There’s far more published per day in physics as a whole than I could read in a year, and most of it I’d find unrelatable and uninteresting.
I guess where I’m going with this is that anyone with a specific interest is already reading papers. It’s their job. Anyone with a general interest would find actively pursing paper hunting to be a waste of time with a ridiculously bad signal to noise ratio. Instead, they should use channels that align closely with their own interests, through which they can get recommendations to read papers from the aforementioned specialists who have already filtered out much of the noise themselves. At that point, they should actually read the resulting papers.
There is another trick, though, and that’s to find an individual who publishes two unrelated pieces of work that you find interesting, then read their work and maybe those of their coauthors. Be careful, though, because this is a slippery slope to specialising, after which you’ll find yourself back at the point where you don’t aren’t following 99.9% of the stuff you wanted to follow in the first place.