Hence "just way too autistic to really succeed".

You could make an alternative social media that is easy to use (the end user doesn't need to understand how federation works when they start using it), but it needs to also provide some feature set that normies want and don't get easily anywhere else. Thats where the creative energy of alt social media *should* be going if we wanted it to actually take off, but you don't see anyone trying to develop such features.