is davinci fusion not an after effects alternative? or is it not at the same level?

There’s crossover in that they both do compositing but AE uniquely has a lot of other things from the motion graphics side that just doesn’t exist anywhere else.

Does the integration of Krokodove into Resolve 21 close that gap at all?

In my experience, it's not easy as After Effects. Though for simple VFX, motion or animation is doable.

For me best alternative to AE is Blender.

Yeah this is the way. Blender has a higher learning curve than AE but it’s ultimately much better at actual 3d than AE is, and the recent improvements to the interface have made it a lot more usable.

Fusion has great potential, but is probably being held back by a lack of community support, the slightly-higher-barrier-of-entry of node-based workflows, and the subtle but annoying ways in which the software can work against you.

TLDR: it does some stuff slower than ae, but nodes allows it to very easily do a lot of stuff that ae struggles with.

It's also a lot easier to parse since node->properties is less nested than comp->layers->effects->properties (and this makes a big difference on cognitive load).

Well, there’s Nuke.