At what point do we say matrix isn't going to work? It's been like this for years. It's so overengineered on an immutable chat history on a blockchain it has crossed the line into "way too expensive to run and maintain for streams of cat pictures and memes". Worse is better.
A decade ago Moxie Marlinspike argued[1] that to develop Signal more quickly, he and his team could not be distracted by federation. At the time I wasn't sure what to think, but it does seem that the effort level of using the integrated approach of client/server/protocol may just logistically be easier.
That's is what I mean by not working. Those are things are are either bugs, or as in the falsely banned issue, a protocol design issue that should have been thought through in the first place
I'll happily move over to XMPP or IRCv4 if they can get it right, I'm not married to the way Matrix does things. But it's good enough, open source, and federated.
The worst I see is from the broader tech community, though. Especially people from the fediverse, they seem to have a strong alignment with XMPP. IRC is still my favorite, personally, but it does seem like Matrix gets unfairly ragged on a bit. Both by the people who think XMPP already does everything Matrix does but better, and from the people who don't care about free software or decentralization and just want everything to be like Discord.