I had a similar experience when I stopped using Twitter. I only go back because a friend of mine posts there and I really like his posts. Occasionally I flip to my Following or For You tabs and they look incredibly sophomoric. It's 40 and 50 year olds using teenager memes and tropes. Then I realized, that a similar sort of mechanic applies on Hacker News so I decided to aggressively killfile users who annoy me one way or another. Now, most HN comment sections have a bunch of comments missing but the remainder are surprisingly decent.
The downside is that I now interact with HN a lot more, which I was hoping would not happen.
Same, I have about 5 friends I follow - but I do it via bookmarked xcancel so I feel less sullied by the experience.
Can't you follow someone without using twitter?
I know that with mastodon I can just subscribe to the rss feed of anyone without using an account, visiting a server's feed or actually firing up a fediverse compatible app