Personally, I was also very picky about who I follow, and also only use “Following” (never “For You”) and the only difference I felt with the Elon acquisition is less censorship — which is both good and bad — and makes it more useful as a news source.
The #1 reason I had to leave Twitter is the degradation of replies. Prioritising blue ticks ruined any productive conversation in the comments. Much like HN is (imho) most valuable for the comments, old twitter was great for the expertise in the replies - where the cream rose to the top. Now it's impossible or takes a lot of scrolling to find useful dialogue.
It's not perfect, but for now Bluesky is scratching that itch of smart commentary immediately after a post. That was enough to get me to completely move to the platform.
Not very egalitarian and I admit to being disgusted by it at the time. In retrospect, it was genius and a net good. Society’s upper class (politicians, CEOs, celebrities, top journalists) spoke freely and frankly on Twitter, and we all got direct real-only access to those feeds. Not a bad setup.
Now their Twitter accounts are managed by their PR team.
2. The new creator incentives have created a ton of people pushing out phony / insincere tweets, rage bait, memes, and stealing content. It has massively decreased signal to noise.
I’m still on Twitter, but mostly out of habit and the few friends I met there that I can’t follow otherwise.