If moments were like this, I might actually open that tab, instead of being annoyed it’s in the way of more important things.

I forget if it was this specific article or not, but you hit on a very strong point when you mentioned that new users really should be following topics, not individual people. Curating a mix of people to follow is a delicate art: you need to unfollow people who tweet too much and try to estimate if a new person you think about following will tweet too much. Following some algorithmic “best-of” for a topic would help get that burden off new users.