If you don't want engagement bait or politics on Twitter.. why are you on Twitter? RSS is better to keep up to date on news, and if none of your friends are on Mastodon, get new friends.
1. People who want to debate / react to things / politics / just get angry apparently.
2. People who are like a town crier from times past, they want to be the first to know some event has happened and then go to their group chats & other social media to post about it.
i think there is still a large enough group which is there to share work / projects
With Twitter, I can see content from people I follow and from content referenced or highlighted by people I follow. People in this case can also include news organizations or other professional journalistic content.
In addition there is the algorithmically generated garbage feed stuff that is mostly useful for seeing (potentially) interesting content that I missed on the main feed, but also contains a ton of content from people I did not follow and that people I do follow did not highlight or reference. Presumably this project attempts to reduce the garbage-ey ness of this feed, which I would appreciate.
I don't know if it's still the case, but there used to be RSS feeds for Twitter accounts too.
You can comment wherever people listen to you.