Dendrite is another homeserver that is good enough to run as a daily driver, and there's a community developed Rust one, Conduit, that's making steady progress.
There are plenty of alternative clients - FluffyChat, NeoChat, Fractal, etc. Making a basic client is pretty easy (I've written several), and my friends and I have been making a more fully-featured one in our spare time.
Federation is not fake, I was there on my own homeserver when matrix.org went down and had fun happily continuing to chat through the biggest test of matrix's federation resiliency.
Every time I've seen Arathorn interact in threads, he has been very professional and patient, even when others spread FUD (cough, cough). He certainly doesn't spread lies or FUD about anyone else.
Modern XMPP is not better in every way - Matrix is an eventually-consistent distributed event graph, which makes it better at handling big federation testing events like the matrix.org downtime.
Also, considering the dismissive tone of your post and your choice of handle/username, it seems you are here (just?) to grind your axe, and not for genuine and honest discussion.
Matrix requires registration with some server. These servers are federated, but the biggest and most commonly used one is matrix.org. So if that's down, most users lose access.
But that's not fake federation, that's just federation and the reality that most people that can't be bothered to set up their own federated server? You can say that a fully distributed chat system would be better at this (like SSB [1]), but that's a totally different beast from a federated system.
Matrix's federation is no worse than any other popular federated system I've used (eg. email and xmpp). I'm not saying it shouldn't be better (I dislike the matrix.org centralization, too), but that's not something inherent to Matrix, and I think it's not honest to bring it up as 'fake federation' in this context.
Additionally, Matrix is significantly better at this in one way than the alternatives: even if matrix.org goes down, all rooms can continue working, even ones with a :matrix.org label. The same can't be said about XMPP MUC, IIUC.
I don't disagree with that, I'm not the OP who called it fake federation.
I do think that federated systems tend to become centralized, because the federating links tend to be unreliable. I think people confuse federation and decentralization, when they're very different things.