My experience as well. I blitzed and grinded followers cuz it was easy and why not. My feed is okay in general, but I had to follower 1.5kish people to get it that way.
But I still get more than twice the engagement and meaningful engagement at that on Mastadon and Kbin, with less than half the followers. I also get little out of twitter, but I may be bad at it.
What I hate about Humble Bundle software and asset stuff is you can't look at the license until after you buy it. We bought a sound effect pack which, as written, we couldn't store the sounds in source control or use it in a commercial work. Humble said we had to bring it up with the creators, and the creators wouldn't ever answer us. Was annoying, but at least a cheap lesson.
May just be a gamble on future tech. IF federation is the future of the web (and I hope it is!) getting in early and helping shape it makes sense. Its also something of proven tech at the moment, so if they just threw this up fast to take advantage of twitter fires, it makes sense to use something that they know works as opposed to pulling a bluesky and doing it all from scratch. Also means there are more developers out there that are familiar with the tech.
They have also already declared that if you federate with them, your instance has to abide by their code of conduct, so they already throwing their weight around.
Seconding learn-gdscript from zero by GDquest. VERY few other tutorials work if you literally don't know how to code at all, GDquests is the only one I know that'll teach you the basics.