Aside from the feature changes, it seems about the same to me. I think it largely depends on who you follow and whether you use the "Following" or "For you" tab. I recommend the "Following" tab since this allows you to manage your feed by, unsurprisingly, selecting who you follow.
The "verified" users being the top comments makes reading any moderately popular thread a bore.
The rolling waves of drama around Musk's latest "idea" eventually got more annoying to read on my Following feed so I left Twitter.
Understood. I have no doubt it would become exhausting to follow people who are distracted by such meta-topics. I take some joy out of unfollowing people who are overly obsessed with topics I find uninteresting.
It doesn’t take someone being overly obsessed but merely reposting once in a blue moon.
It had been going downhill since before Musk, he's not to blame for the start of that. But it's certainly spiraled and become unusable since the acquisition.