To put this into perspective, here's user growth over the last few days [1]. Before Musk bought Twitter, it was often ~4k a day. Earlier today it was back down to less than 2k an hour, after a peak a bit above 4k an hour after the journalist fiasco.

It's currently at 5,477 in the last hour.

Before the journalist fiasco it had fallen back to ~1k/hour, and I think you need to go back to Nov 19th to find similar peaks.

In other words, things had died down massively, and he's chosen to pointlessly inflame things again rather than letting it calm down further.

[1] https://bitcoinhackers.org/@mastodonusercount/10953715946301...