Kind 3 was probably a mistake, following could have been local or private by default, and assigning public "trust" to people could have been taken a more intentional form, with more structure to it rather than "whoever I want to see posts from I put in this list and now that person gets an endorsement from me".

But following people is still a good thing.

I do think the focus on following people should be drastically reduced (no one can really "follow" more than 100 people) and that we need more opinionated relays like wss://theforest.nostr1.com/ and more tools for browsing relays, recommending relays, publishing to specific relays.

It shouldn't be necessary for a new user to click on a follow button hundreds of times in order to get a feed. Clients shouldn't be required to send many hundreds of REQs (most of which will be about pubkeys that haven't posted anything for months) to a bunch of relays in order to build a default feed. That number can be cut drastically and Nostr can still work fine, in fact much better.