Yes, it does seem to do a pretty good job of showing you relevant stuff, along with the human recommendations of fellow users when you subscribe to them, or simply the indications of people followed by people you follow.

Muting/blocking seems pretty effective in refining the feed.

The main problem I find is where people you are interested in overpost or overshare, telling the world what they had for breakfast, or posting pictures of their cat asleep on a table.

The absence of hashtags (in itself a positive for me) means there is no way of telling Notes (or any such system) 'show me posts by XXXX but not if they are about YYYY'.

Eventually, as with any social interaction, those that I find too annoying on balance will simply be unfollowed/muted. It's a minor inconvenience.