Pandemic lock downs are 99% over. People are getting back outside and returning to office. These effects have little to do with Twitter's specific actions.

I see more spam these days, particularly coming from accounts that paid for the blue check mark. IIRC, Musk said that paid verification would make things better since scammers wouldn't dare pay for it (I would find where he said this but I hit the 600 tweet limit), but given how lax their verification standards are, it seems to be a boon to scammers, much the same way that Let's Encrypt let anyone get a free TLS cert at the cost of destroying the perceived legitimacy that came with having HTTPS in front of your domain.

(And IMO, that perceived legitimacy was unfounded for both HTTPS and the blue check before both were easy to get, it's just that the bar had to drop to the floor for most people to realize how little it meant.)