I think there must have been some kind of nuance beyond that, at some point. The number of people claiming that they couldn't view twitter links — and I'm sure this started pre-Elon — suggests to me that, like someone else has mentioned, there might have been different behaviour for 'anonymous' vs. 'not-logged-in' viewers.

The main difference to me was that I could see the "trending" tweets and additional "recommended" tweets after the comments on the one that I was reading. That started post Elon. There was also the login popup that was trivial to X out that seemed to appear more frequently after Elon took over.

The pre-Musk behaviour was fairly straightforward to my recollection: All logged out accounts could view a single tweet and some percentage of the replies. They could also view a profile but, similarly, scrolling down a certain number of tweets triggered the modal.

It was a good compromise.