>filled with bots

Twitter wasn't the only place that happened, yeah. 2016 was the start of a lot of changes to the internet, more than I think people are aware, and one of them was the all social media saw a flood of bots we've still been trying to deal with. Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, probably even DeviantART and Tumblr in all seriousness.

Not sure if I agree with "as strong and effective as ever", but from my experience I also can't disagree that the site isn't always a total hellscape if you do know where to look. Twitter tries to give you what you already want, which for some people, is all the evil shit they claim they want to escape from. Twitter's too full of attention seekers, which was always there from the start since, hey, this started as a site people told bad jokes. You only tell bad jokes into the either if you were expected a lot of people to laugh and think you were cool.

It used to be one of the best places to share art and updates related to media creation. No, I'm not joking. Twitter before 2016 was a place people shared bad jokes and you could hear what your favorite celeb was up to at the same time. 2016 saw bots infiltrate and the more negative sides started growing.

Elon isn't the cause of what ruined Twitter, he's just a natural evolution of what that site deliberately attracted after a few changes in ideals. About 90% of the things he's implemented existed and then were immediately removed due to controversy or regulations years before he bought the site but people who use the site have famously short memories so they think he magically invented the crap policies.

If it does end up crashing then whatever comes after will likely focus on the art and media aspects as Reddit and even Facebook already catered to most of what Twitter offered, but that's just a guess.

TDLR; important people use it basically because it used to be an art and media update site until interests changed and people aren't leaving the site yet.