I'm able to use lists in X accounts that are private / non-posting. But the UI for creating lists has become extremely obscure and unintuitive. You maybe have just not found where / how to create them?

In the good old days, tweetdeck made it very easy. Also when "free speech champion" twitter allowed 3rd party clients, tweetbot (by tapbots) also made it easy and so clean to use. As far as I can tell, twitter under elon is hell-bent on making it entirely un-usable. Aside from people knee-jerk disagreeing with his politics, I think the UI devolution of twitter is probably driving a lot of people to nostr.