I don't see how you can come to this conclusion. Twitter is not a protocol, is a corporation with a profit-motive, and sees itself as the town square of the internet with its design geared toward this function.
Mastodon is about as far from trading in for another Twitter alternative as you can come and that's largely what makes its design so difficult to grasp for Twitter emigrants.
Are there other protocols that fix some of ActivityPub's design flaws? Yes, like nostr and Bluesky's AT Protocol. But ActivityPub, being an open protocol, can also be massaged into a better one by its community.
Personally, I've found my corner of Mastodon to be a much kinder place than Twitter perhaps because it does not profess to be the town square of the internet nor pursues that status.
Ultimately, I think what we're seeing here is the transparent lie sold to us by Meta and Twitter and Instagram: that social media superapps that try to tie the world together are not forces of good to unite but ultimately weapons that serve to divide it. We are not equipped as a species for the cacophonous screams of billions, only the Bodhisattva of compassion Kuan-Yin, She Who Hears the Cries of the of World, can do this, and she arguably doesn't exist.
So yes, you are at the mercy of whatever server mods you happen to drift to on Mastodon but you are not powerless, like on Twitter.