Lemmy is just awful about reacting only to the headlines

That’s pretty much normal all over the internet. It’s a bad human behaviour heavily exploited via attention economics, of course such bad traits get reinforced. Staying in one place and thinking gets disincentivised (you might even put down your phone! Outrageous!!) and outright punished through dark patterns and antifeatures, faster scrolling and high frequency interaction with populistic takes is being rewarded with shiny stuff on your profile, Karma, hearts, stars etc.