Does Franco's use of the split screen even serve a purpose?

It served no purpose, it was the director showing off.

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I think a split screen works in modern, tech-like movies only. Or TV. Like the TV show 24, which kind of popularized it. This technique just feels really modern to me.

Franco's splitscreen technique is a polyptychic technique he employed to display all the diverse, simultaneously transpiring perspectives of the characters

The technique directly mirrors the polyptychic construction of Faulkner's novel: each chapter is a panel of one person's perspective, some chapter sets are diptych and triptych, two (diptych) or three (triptych) chapters of two or three different panel perspectives unfolding and converging together to depict different-but-interlocking angles of a shared situation

Franco used a similar diptych technique in his The Broken Tower, but it was not a split-screen diptych, it was more of a segment one youth portrait that unfolded into a twin segment two adult portrait

Yes, I agree that he used the split screen to tell when two different perspectives were going on. It said on Wikipedia there would never be a way for the novel to be adapted for the screen, but I think he was able to do so by employing the split screen. If two things were going on at the same time he could show them both. I think there was a scene where it showed his brother in the field from two different angles, but other than that i think he used it wisely. Also talking to the camera seemed to help explain things too.