Like the old person I am, I still don’t like people retweeting praise about their own content. It not only feels like bragging, it’s also extremely boring

I don't mind so much. As an independent consultant, I do it because nobody else will ... plus my income fell by 75%+ in the past year, so everything helps. Also, not everybody sits on Twitter all day, so only a small number of people will see it anyway. YMMV of course.

Other people mentioning you is great, of course, maybe they’ll turn into followers. But people who follow you already don’t need much convincing anymore, do they? I prefer to stick to likes and occasional replies.

This surprises me every time it happens, and has really changed my view of how people use Twitter ... but I regularly have (often long time!) followers asking me what the C4 model is, or what my tooling recommendations are, etc.

As I said, most people are not sitting on Twitter all day, watching the fire hose of tweets, and "following" is not the same as actually reading. When I fire up the Twitter app, I rarely scroll back to see what I've missed, and I suspect most people do the same.

You should take a look at your Twitter analytics, and see what sort of viewing numbers you're getting. I bet they are lower than you think. Spot the meme-y tweet in this screenshot. Everything else is just white noise... 😂