How do you keep track of replies and mentions here?

Something I've run into repeatedly and I can't tell whether it's the platform, my settings, or just me.

I found a comment on my own intro thread that had been sitting there 20 days. It was the most useful piece of feedback anyone has given me on this platform, someone had taken the time to pull apart my positioning properly, and I only saw it because I happened to be scrolling my own activity. No notification appeared. Same thing again this week with two people who tagged me on launch day. So I was three weeks late to both.

On the other hand, when a notification does arrive and I tap it, it often drops me at the top of a thread rather than at the comment itself. On a thread with 400+ comments, that turns a ten-second reply into a hunt, and on mobile I sometimes give up.

What I've been doing so far is manually re-reading my own threads every few days, which works but obviously doesn't scale and misses anything where I'm tagged somewhere I've never posted.

So, two questions for people who are here more than I am. Do you rely on the notification feed at all, or have you built some habit around it? And is there a setting I've missed that makes mentions more reliable?

Genuinely possible the answer is that I've had something switched off this whole time.