Don't underestimate the effect of Elon nuking the Twitter employee base when he acquired the company. All the predictions were that Twitter would die. It hasn't. That sent a powerful message to the other leaders of tech companies: "You can do just as much with far fewer people" / "Most of your employees aren't doing needle moving work". Shortly thereafter, Zuck announced layoffs at Meta. These new attitudes towards headcount have cascaded down from the top-tier tech companies down through the ecosystem of companies.

except they laid off of a lot of trust and safety and marketing, and twitter has never been the same in that regard.

eng—has twitter really changed much since acquisition? it seems to me like twitter had really great eng to begin with. keeping the lights on is much different from building new product.