Hmm, maybe it has improved. I did this around a year ago. I spent weeks trying to train it, hiding every single "X liked this post" "Y commented on this post" and worse "Z liked a comment on this post" hoping to only see actual posts by my actual friends but it never worked. The reason I unfollowed everything was to stop my self from coming back to Facebook and scrolling through pages of garbage, wasting my time. Now if I ever accidentally visit Facebook (I do use messenger.com) it's empty so I close the tab straight away.

I was recently surprised to find out they if you deactivate your account, FB gives you the option to keep Messenger. Might be an option for you or OP.

Most of the posts from friends on facebook are personal posts and even the ones that are my friends commenting on posts or sharing stories are at least somewhat interesting to me because I want to see what my friends think are interesting or important.