It may also reduce chilling effects on good actors. Some speech may be worth sharing but may not currently be shared because of those effects.
Pretty sure that will just let bad actors back in and drive the good faith users away. You could be underestimating the number of normal users a single bad actor can drive away.
Even when you remove the more centralized moderation, there still have to be some mechanism there to remove the bad actors.
Twitter is being used as a political weapon in a political war.
Actual bad actors who spam, harass (which requires repeated unrelenting action, not just one-time nastiness), defame or incite violence... nobody cares if their posts get removed. Defending them is not what Musk or the political right is on about.
Whereas if you start with the popular platform and progressively remove moderation, you end up with different effects, because you still have the core, non-bad-actor population. That is, if your signal-to-noise ratio goes down, but the absolute amount of interaction with your platform increases, it may still be worth it.