> it was also used as a positive signal when ranking content

This is (in my opinion) why they slowed down verifications to a crawl, because they realized it shouldn't necessarily lead to boosted importance, and that it certainly wouldn't scale if they opened up identity verification to everyone instead of just "famous people".

So like every other half-baked feature that remained only partially rolled out for years, or features that were briefly available and then were hidden altogether, they just sat on it in fear of making any changes at all.