To be fair, and as the article acknowledges, #Mastodon *is* harder to use than #Twitter or #Facebook. A lot of the difficulty is in deciding where to get started, the paralysis of choice, and that can leave a bad taste in your mouth which affects the whole experience. First impressions matter.
But it isn't *that* much harder, and there's real value in choice too. More to the point—again as the article says—there's value in, well, values. Nobody's getting rich off Mastodon. It exists because people think something like it would be neat to have, and they want to share that neatness with others who think the same. There are egos involved to be sure, but no one person's ego can bring it all crashing down.
As a practical matter, it is AFAICT the first and only open-source, distributed, not-for-profit social media platform that registers as a threat to the big players. That counts for a lot in my book.
Remember when the internet felt promising instead of overwhelming, depressing, and sometimes terrifying? Mastodon's bringing some of that back, at least for me.