Someone reached me on Signal thinking I was ChatGPT, it had given them my number

C'mon be realistic. It's like asking every software to support Windows XP. With its native UI toolkit. Every creator has a dream to build a beautiful app, and the majority of the users want eye candy. To balance that, you need to do a few things. Appeasing nerds is good when it's a niche site. MASTODON is positioning itself as a competitor to twitter, you walk forwards and up the game, not run backward. No avg user will ever like to use plain text/image. UI, at least, the major demographic that uses social media doesn't want to. You want to make adoption easier, not harder.