The point of the verification badges was like swag at the oscars. It was perks for VIPs and that is what induced the celebrities to get on the platform originally.
If you just want Twitter to be a space for famous people, hack politicians and hack journalists, influencers, to hang out like a red carpet party with everybody else gawking at them... well yeah, you'd want to keep the old way.
That also means a citizen journalist with accurate information gets to shout into the void whereas a hack who called in a favor from a friend who works at Twitter gets a megaphone.
Do you like the system where normies get locked out of their Google accounts and have to come here or beg on Twitter for a googler to do them a solid? Not to mention that the checkmarked got to use the app with exclusive features and a better experience?
Why support a caste system? This way a NYT journalist is still marked as affiliated with the NYT, just with a different icon or exclusive perks.
Without paying for the checkmark the spammy bots/humans will have limited reach. Hopefully there will be less vile content in the future as a result. If not I'm sure they'll try something else.
Which is good in the long run. The blue check is like the https padlock. People mistakenly think that it implies security, which it doesn't. Twitter has essentially become a CA within its domain. And gold = EV validation.
It sure does.
For instance, you cannot make a secure request to a domain that is using a different name from the one in the TLS certificate it is serving, e.g. a domain like "gobble.com" serving a certificate issued for "google.com", will be seen as insecure.
Same could have happened with the blue check. Now it is meaningless.
Now it definitely has no utility at all any more.