It's wonderful that it seems work well for you but my experience in bridging group chats with XMPP or IRC was terrible. Lost messages, bridge crashes, puppet accounts getting randomly broken/duplicated with discarded messages.

From the bridges I've run, only the Telegram bridge is somewhat stable for me but it also has it's warts.

Might be different if you run a strictly personal server for 1:1 conversations but I'd say from an ux perspective the bridges idea largely failed IMHO.

I don't think it's the fault of element/matrix it's a difficult problem and I guess with limited resources they made a lot of progress and made things possible that weren't before but it's not plug and play, at least it wasn't for me.

In general I've found it's also difficult to communicate in group chats if there are two worlds with a slightly different view (missing reactions, some elements of the messenger are not supported like captions, polls and so on...)

While I generally agree, the slidge bridge for XMPP has been working quite well for me, especially whatsapp, but it is really new.