I used to have the same opinion as the parent poster. I'd tell people that Twitter is actually really great if you curate your feed. Unfortunately, I can't tell people that anymore, because it's not possible to do.
For some background, I've only become a real user of Twitter this year (I've had an account for ages, but never used it much). Currently there is one topic of interest to me I'd like to follow the community closely. Independently (before reading this article), I've also found the timeline useless as well. Instead I follow a handful to a dozen of people by turning on notification for them in addition to follow. Every day I go to notification tab in my Twitter app, tap on the one for tweets from people I enabled notification for. This is a chronologically sorted list of tweets by these people. This has been the only way Twitter has been useful to me.
It sounds like Lists is basically like that but allows me to follow multiple topics like that. It does however seem to require a different app than the official Twitter app, so I'll have to play around with it some more if there is another topic I care to follow on Twitter about.
I also don’t seem to get weird tweets anymore and I just remembered that I added some weird strings to my mute list at the suggestion of someone else on Twitter. I Googled a few and apparently this is a thing? There’s an article in Vice about it, for what that is worth:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/7kz9ez/go-into-2020-by-takin...
On mobile, I think it stopped reverting to non-chronological for me many months ago. My suggested follows are typically friends/kids of friends. Like GP of this thread, my experience with Twitter is positive but I only follow about 100 people. Main criticism is that with a curated list, it can be a bit of a wasteland sometimes - either rarely new tweets to see, or you post something to generate discussion and get nothing.
I see people complain about this a lot, but I've not experienced this. Is it a mobile thing? On my computer I got put into the algorithmic feed once, when they launched it I guess, then I changed it to "latest" and it's still like that today.
The whole blue check Stanford Prison Experiment of giving verified people/accounts additional privileges and boosted rankings also doesn’t help matters. What was supposed to be a security feature became a status symbol.