I absolutely agree.
Reaching the masses and keeping all of the mass content requires money, since investors are starting to realize that gazillions of views do not necesarilly equals profit, they are asking about ROI, which in turn makes the masses-reaching platforms look for ways to monetize those views, and that does not sit well with privacy caring people, but the masses don’t care about that.
I really hope the masses never fill the fediverse with their nonsensical content.
If you just want to join an instance, it doesn’t really matter if they are running Mastodon, Pleroma (or one of the forks), you will be able to follow and interact with everyone else on the microblog portion of the Fediverse. In fact from a Kbin instance you can do Lemmy communities and Mastodon microblogging from the same platform (Kbin calls communities Magazines and in the magazines are Threads, and they call the mastodon-like portion is just called microblog).
If you want to self-host your own instance, then you need to pay attention to the difference in the platfoms, Pleroma is lighter, Mastodon is more modular, and there are many forks of both each with their own strenghts and weakenesses.
If you don’t like the frontend, you can use Elk, or Soapbox, or some others out there, as well as all the apps and PWAs for either platform, most are compatible with both.