You bring up a lot of good points, so just some general tips for other readers.

> Political stuff notwithstanding

Don't follow people who post about politics and use muting and mute words liberally.

> consume a non-algorithmic feed

New-ish: Following -> Latest. As an aside, the supposed algorithm is on GitHub[1].

> disable videos and photos in the feed

uBlock or Control Panel for Twitter.

1. https://github.com/xai-org/x-algorithm