Personally? I interact with people I know, not #brands. And I do that by following, not by @'ing out of the blue. Everybody I know does the same. If somebody with a name I recognize follows me, I'm gonna follow them back and @'ing is fine.
What you are describing is a tinder approach to twitter, which serve fundamentally different roles in the online social sphere. I understand that is how you and yours use twitter, but extrapolating that behavior across hundreds of millions of users is almost certainly hasty.
