this is/was important because people can copy someone's profile pic and come up with a username that's close ie @elonmmusk

this used to be a big deal because people could steal celebrity handles. that's why many famous accounts start with @theReal...

celebrities being reachable on twitter is a big part of the appeal. anything that helps them to protect their brands is good for business

this is just companies thinking they can scale w/o customer service. If you work in ecom, you'll know that businesses like amazon and ebay have been tackling (with varying success) verifying manufacturers and so forth. My competitor does not instantly get a brand store under my company name. I think facebook has largely dealt with fake accounts purporting to be businesses as well. It's a human problem, not a technical one

That works because there's money involved in the accounts. Where does the money come from to manually verify all the socmed accounts?

That's a great way of putting it. Maybe something like Reddit's user flairs could make sense, where the check mark would accompany a label verifying some aspect of the person it's attached to (e.g. "@emmanuelmacron, President of France")

Verification (on all the big social networks) is only[1] for people that get impersonated, this is correlated to fame, but not the cause.

A lot of people get this mixed up! but it more adequately explains low-follower outliers.

[1] only-ish

That's the reason that social media companies do this, but in practice among the users it becomes a status symbol (see: anyone campaigning to get a blue check on twitter)