Personally, I don't use FB anymore even though I still have an account. I use Messenger to keep up with my closest friends and I use Instagram for photo sharing and general life updates. I don't follow anyone who I don't actually consider a friend and my profile is on private. I further restrict my circle with Instagram's "Close Friends" feature when I want to share something on my story with only a select few.

Prior to that, though, I just made extensive use of Facebook's unfollow feature and a few key uBlock Origin filters (that block out any posts containing the words "____ was tagged in a post" or such).

Also, for what it's worth, I only follow ~200 people on Instagram so maybe I don't have enough feed content to generate any, but I have NEVER seen an advertisement on Instagram and all of the posts also appear in chronological order for me. I get the feeling that most of the people who have a bad time with FB or Instagram are the people who don't use the unfollow feature for their uncle that spends all day posting inflammatory political rants or who follow spammy Instagram accounts that are just promotion bots.

If you use FB and FB's apps and services to keep up with your friends, your real friends, I think they're pretty great.

Edit: For those interested, these are my uBlock filters for facebook.com:

https://pastebin.com/GHwpM9bY

If you're tired of the noise in your feed I recommend trying these out. They aren't particularly well organized, when I first started using uBlock Origin I wasn't all too familiar with the syntax, but they do a pretty good job (for me).