I do appreciate the concern, and you expressed it well, but it does not come up that often in my experience. As an example, this topic is from 2015 and currently has 7 replies.
This is indeed a bit of a dilemma, one idea is that you could mute certain categories (or tags) that are not of interest?
I think most people adapt reasonably well to the “scan the list of topics, enter the particular topics you may find of interest, then dismiss the rest” approach:
Note that, as an intentional convenience, the Dismiss… button will appear at both the top and bottom of the list if you have enough items in the New or Unread lists.