What a coincidence! I have done the exact same thing but on Instagram instead of Facebook and have had similar results to yours. Since both belong to Meta, we can safely assume that they use the same or very similar backends to serve ads.
I think it would be interesting to do a large scale experiment to see what can happen.
I've been doing this for a couple years. My feed is better, but they still have plenty of garbage I'm not interested in. I make it a point to scroll until I have blocked two of these - that is my signal that it is time to read. Hopefully if more of us start that rule of two eventually it will be populate enough that they notice and add a mode for those like to better see our friends thus keeping us a little longer (I doubt it, but it would be nice).
I think it would be interesting to do a large scale experiment to see what can happen.