This might be a weird take because I only thought about it after reading your comment, which I am really curious to hear others opinions on as well. On Reddit, I can usually guess the 3 top level comments, and for any others that I don't - the comment came from a repost bot detecting bot that reposts the previous top level. The number of comments is higher, but sorting by new or controversial is a test of patience and morbid curiosity, so who actually sees these thousands of posts? I'm not saying what Lemmy has is better by any stretch, but it's novel for the time being and a good break from all the stuff I've been complaining about for years now.
I do get FOMO from not having all that information on r/all immediately within reach, but Lemmy has really helped me curb my reddit addiction in a good way. I don't think this really answered your question at all, but I think I am getting closer to understanding others that look past it. I was a digg refugee as well, so maybe I'm just getting used to the idea of starting over.
These days all the data used to inform decisions internally feel like they're completely made up to support whatever bias the manager already has. This used to be an org dependent problem but it's everywhere now, AWS, retail, digital.