Yeah to me xitter is still a viable news source from certain journalists. Also just having friends send meme threads or whatever is annoying when you can't read it.
I've found that some of the nitter mirrors still work every so often when their rate limits reset but it's not ideal - https://nitter.privacydev.net/
Unfortunately I can't see an obvious way that a fork of nitter would not encounter the same issues with the xitter API aggressively blocking/limiting scraping and GET requests.