"generally bad and annoying" breaks whatever ideal of 'free speech' one might have. The most concrete thing Musk has said is "twitter should just follow the laws of countries", but spam bots are not illegal - USPS cannot unilaterally ban junk mail because that breaks the first amendment

Interviewer: You've described yourself, Elon, as a free speech absolutist, but does that mean that there's literally nothing that people can't say and it's okay?

Musk: Well, I think obviously Twitter or any forum is bound by the laws of the country that it operates in. So obviously there are some limitations on free speech in the US, and, of course, Twitter would have to abide by those rules. [...] No, I think, like I said, in my view Twitter should match the laws of the country

Quite a struggle for an international website, where the majority of users are outside of the US, to just say "we should follow the laws of countries" as if there's one single internationally compatible law for that.

Oh, absolutely. The platform is overrun with bots. Here's an interesting exercise to try: search for a unique phrase on Twitter and see how many results you get that are posting verbatim copypasta from seemingly "unique" accounts, especially around popular trending topics. Detecting this should not be too difficult I imagine.