My understanding is overall engagement is also currently down

When I finally left Twitter most of the engagement was obviously bots either repeating other tweets or spamming unrelated dross on high activity threads for engagement farming. The number is high, but the quality is negligible.

That was my experience as well.

But then people came back. The "For you" tab has been much more interesting for me than previously and in my industry I see tons of interesting content.

Again, I hate what EM did to Twitter but there's that.

That may be the case but from what I’m reading overall engagement is down this year. So I’m not really sure what metrics we’re using to say “they’re thriving” when ad dollars are down, engagement is down, user acquisition is down, valuation is down…