I feel you. I’ve been spending a long time doing the same. I wanted to also clean up my digital footprint by requesting account deletion and data erasure (thanks to GDPR that is actually possible), however some companies make it extremely difficult to do this.

I tried something similarily, although I stopped when there was some filtering rules I couldn’t figure out.This thread has inspired me to take that up again.

Main advantages of this I would say:

1. No endless scrolling as you say
2. No cheap tricks (blinking red capital letters screaming BREAKING NEWS at you)
3. No falling for the headline switcheroo - you see each article once. You might miss some updates in an article, but they are usually minor and when something big happens it tends to generate many articles anyway. If it’s really important, you will see it.
4. Certain RSS clients (like Fluent Reader) allow you to view articles in app, which allows you to skip visiting the newsite altogether. Doesn’t work with paywalls, though.