FWIW, I can't recall seeing Elon except as retweets. The downsides are the bots, the exodus, and the stupid renaming, but it's been almost entirely improvement to me.

I was pretty tired of Mastodon and thus happy to return when Elon bought it.

ETA: I use a preferred subset of my follows for my main feed, a few subject-delineated lists for particular research, and occasionally my "following" feed to branch out.