To me federation sounds like a nightmare of politics between different instances. Those politics getting in the way of content creators and their followers seem to make everything hard to navigate.

I am much more thrilled about protocols where the author owns their own account and content, like Secure Scuttlebutt or Nostr, but those seem like very green and barely used at this moment.

There are literally millions of people using Fediverse right now without any such problems. You just made up a problem here that has no basis in reality.