This shouldn't be a surprise, given I've heard many times over the years about how 'hard' such influencers had to work (nagging twitter employees, leveraging content agencies, etc.) to get such checkmarks. It was an exclusive club, nobody likes it when their cool club gets ruined by plebians.

That said, I don't think Elon's plan will work all the same, but for different reasons. I've seen people donate $100USD multiple times to send abusive messages to streamers. $20/mo is too low a threshold to gatekeep bad actors.