What's the point of such a service? It sounds like performative nonsense.

If you read the comments on the Github issue for Nitter shutting down you'll see that's precisely what it is

Others have explained about not being able to see all content, profiles and such.

I’ll add another reason why I redirect to it: XCancel is/was a lot faster than X and had IMO a much cleaner UI, especially when reading larger conversations or groups of tweets. I don’t browse X much, but I already have an extension installed to redirect certain sites, so adding a redirect was an easy win. I’ll miss it.

Do you make the same complaint when folks post links to archive.is? If not, why is this different?

That is the point. It's a way to get the value of a service you don't like, while signaling to everyone that you're too virtuous to use the service you're getting value out of.

You need an account to access X. Change the URL to xcancel and you can view these accounts.

It also looks like X requires a Google or Apple account to sign up if you don’t use your phone number. I’m not linking any of that to the X cesspool.

You are referring to X/Twitter right?