Even if you believe that Musk and team don’t “touch the scales” of the algorithm, the inevitable consequence of the decision to prioritize comments of people willing to pay for blue checks, is to discourage users not in that segment from engagement at all levels.

The resulting shift in attention data naturally propagates to weight the input to the algorithm away from “what does an average user pay attention to” and more towards “what does a paying user pay attention to.”

Setting morality aside, this is a self-consistent, if IMO short-sighted, business goal. What it is not is a way to create a fair and impartial “mirror” as you have described.