Mastodon trades one set of problems (centralised authority, terrible management, beholden to advertisers) for another set of problems (expensive n^2 bookkeeping of decentralised model, moderator fiefdoms, less polished UX). Whether you find one of those worlds easier to live with than another is up to you.
So far, the people who've moved to Mastodon seem happy with that choice, myself included.
Personally, I find the UX on Mastodon is strictly superior to Twitter. The UI is more responsive, you have Tweetdeck style columns that let you track lists on the same page, you can mark content as sensitive, collapse long posts, and automatically caption images. I find all of these things are big quality of life improvements for me.
I also really like the fact that you can turn off notifications for likes and boosts. I only care about replies, and this lets me avoid the noise in my notifications.
Finally, another big UX feature is that you can follow people on other platforms that support ActivityPub. For example, I follow a few photographers on Pixelfed, and some streams on Lemmy in my feed.
So far, the people who've moved to Mastodon seem happy with that choice, myself included.