You also get posts that they may have favourited or friend a they follow. That's when things get toxic.

Twitter was just starting to share favorites when I stopped using it. What a terrible decision that was.

No. That’s not what Twitter does. That’s something some clients do , unfortunately including the official Twitter clients.

I just see tweets from those I follow, in chronological order, with no ads.

If I saw ads, “recommended” or “trending” etc., I’d get off that client in a hurry.

Twitter indeed works like that. You’ve used the star menu to set your feed to chronological, which is not the default.

Not only is it not the default, it switches back after an arbitrary amount of time (they do say they'll do that when you switch, but they aren't specific on how long and don't alert you when it's gone back)

I don’t use any client from Twitter (such as the official Twitter app or the Twitter dot com website) and I’d probably rather stop using Twitter than use one of them.

That’s my point: Twitter isn’t half as good if using the official clients.