Yes, I signed in out of curiosity, and I was completely disoriented because there was no feed of just the people I followed. I kept clicking around, thinking I was missing something obvious.
They tried to get away with not having it, hoping people would be happy consuming curated (paid) content and making them advertising bucks. I bet they had it ready to go from the get-go and were hoping they wouldn't have to turn it on.
Do you have any evidence that the placement in algorithmic timeline was monetized? They have said that they expect to eventually roll out advertising, but for now at least, there aren't any (explicitly inserted) ads.
I've noticed that the Following tab for me is kinda empty since a lot of people I'm following aren't posting much yet. I think the algorithmic view was mostly there to prevent the app from feeling like a ghost town as it was getting started.
It seems like a feature that they should have had at launch. I haven't downloaded Threads and don't intend to, but I was surprised when I read that this was something they didn't have before. Seems like one of the most common things users would want to do.
I think they were rushing it to try to take advantage of Twitter's X-plosion. From my understanding, it was a bit of a mad dash behind the scenes to get to the initial release.