Funny enough, one of the first thing Elon's team did after buying Twitter was remove login gating. There was a big bottom signup CTA on the old Twitter. Then at some point I guess they realized why the old Twitter team did that in the first place (financial pressure for targeted ads) and went harder in that direction to also push for subscriptions.

I still disagree with it, since it's a poor first experience. Replying, customized feeds, etc should be enough incentive to sign up for a social media site.