Or maybe I need to subscribe to fewer news communities?
That’s my take: curation. It only mitigates some of the issues and you still need to put some effort almost everyday, but it’s the only way for me to make it beareable.
The first thing I did on Lemmy was to set the homepage to “Subscribed”, and only went to “All” a few times to populate a small inital list of communities. From that point, you can organically discover the rest.
I also recommend an RSS reader, it’s the best way to get control of “your homepage”.
But I’ve never tried the other option you mention: more private circles (paid substacks, discords, …), so I cannot compare.