It’s sad how few people have the self awareness to realize they’re being played
At least that's what I think about why Twitter staff was ever so "important", because they are social media people by trade. Some people are heard more than others in the "uncritically repeating someone's sentiment" mode.
https://www.npr.org/2022/11/25/1139180002/twitter-loses-50-t...
By having all those workers and features in the works, it prolonged their position and increased evaluation. Which as we can see worked amazingly. Usually they would have sold to a tech giant like Microsoft or Facebook. An entity that can eat the cost because they don't know what to do with themselves and don't care about profits.
Musk won't make back what they bought Twitter for, not even close, and neither would have the original investors if nobody bought it.
More interestingly, I have a theory that the app has not had a large-scale breakage precisely because of the reason they had bloat.
Having a large org run on microservices makes it likely that you are running more infra than you require. But then failures tend to be self-contained in systems. This then means that on average, a failure will only affect one small part of the system rather than the whole.
It will be interesting to hear post-mortems from engineers once the spotlight dies down and people are ready to talk about what is happening internally.
Real reason:
Twitter cut half its staff and still works fine. Everyone said it would explode and the servers would shit the bed, but you don't need 7000 employees to maintain 5 features. As soon as it was clear half the employees were redundant, other companies realized they could lay off some of their useless people too. Companies had huge bloat and realized the core operations would be fine if you can some people, so they did.