I use old.reddit.com and have a heavily filtered r/all for general news (which I could do without), and specifically participating in discussions that are almost entirely text around what may or may not be a text post.
Other people use it like an image board or video feed.
I do agree that reducing the amount of media can mitigate junk, though.
I dunno, something about the text-only medium seems to keep a lot of junk at bay.