If you miss seeing big names, though, and let's not pretend there's no appeal in that, Mastodon is lacking.
I actually just have manual bookmarks to Twitter pages of the like half dozen people I think are at all worth reading. And then I use libredirect (https://libredirect.github.io/) to avoid hitting the actual Twitter website so I don't have to log in (don't have an account anyway) and don't see nonsense recommended posts.
I assume that will break with API changes, at which point I just won't read those people anymore unless they cross post on Mastodon. But it's worked well so far.
Obviously eliminates any possibility of trying to win the comments section, but I don't really see that as a true negative.
Thank you for this! I know of and use some of these already, just from luck of discovery, and having a compilation of several more is so freeing!
But there was a period where I could do it all on Twitter and it was convenient. Perhaps it was never meant to be, as the incentives are kind of twisted.