You don't have to squint very hard to find them, given that the result of Elon's quest to destroy Twitter's "woke mind virus" (which he was ranting about when he bought the platform) is making a safe space for them and boosting their content as much as possible.

> What I witnessed was tons of people jumping ship on day 1.

There were definitely waves of jumping ship. Some people left on day 1, presumably because, well, life is too short to have to deal with Musk. But IIRC the biggest boosts to Mastodon traffic (for most of the early period Bluesky was invite only so not a useful metric) were around when it started banning a bunch of journalists (this later seems to have been abandoned as a strategy), brought back a bunch of particularly egregious lunatics, and nuked the third party API. Those inciting events were scattered from late 2022 to early 2023.