People love toxic and ragebaiting shit. Facebook, Reddit, Xitter all push it to the forefront and their users eat that right up. It may annoy them and destroy their mental health but arguing over the internet with strangers have always been addictive.

It was 100% due to to the lack of content and communities, but more importantly because people in general don't care about the concept of federation and don't want to learn about it, and will actively resist any attempts to "educate" them about it. Threadiverse is for geeks and will never be as popular as traditional corporate social media. Just like GNU/Linux will never be a dominant OS, no matter how good it is.