I’m barely seeing any content at all, I often see a post click on the community and it shows either 2 other posts and nothing else or nothing at all. It constantly seems like the majority of posts just disappear into the void.

It is much much more of a pain to access content on small instances where it hasn't synced yet. It means visiting those larger instances anyway to check if it's worth subscribing to communities. And then trying to actually subscribe is a lesson in patience while it gives you no search results and errors out if you try to visit an unsynced community directly.