I believe there are improvements on Mastodon that can be made to update trends faster, to create trends from words that aren’t explicitly preceded by # symbol, etc.
But anyways Twitter trends had become absolutely garbage in last 4-5 years, it was always some marketing team of celebrity making useless things trend, or some K-pop group, etc. Twitter trends stopped being relevant long back. Twitter Topics picked up the slack for a while before their algos started filling up topics with promotions and ads.
I am happy to let things develop slowly on Mastodon. As someone from Computer Science academia, there are plenty of privacy preserving algorithms that have been developed which could power things like trends or topics, etc. on Mastodon without resorting to endless data surveillance. But it will take time for those things to percolate into the platform. Slow but steady is the way to go!