Yeah, this has been a pretty obvious change in the recent months/years. I started noticing tweets in my timeline that were there because it was something someone I follow had replied to -- and these tweets were often "outrage-worthy" or otherwise click/flame-bait. I have since written my own Chrome extension to hide all "suggested" tweets of that sort (as well as hiding all sponsored tweets, and the "Favorite" button).

There's a pretty long list of CSS classes you can just toss a "display: none" on, but unfortunately other stuff can only be discerned by checking that certain elements are inside a given container. I had to start writing actual JS to evaluate the contents of the page and omit/delete stuff that way.