I do think this probably isn't the reason for rate-limiting tweets so harshly; I don't know for sure, but I suspect this isn't a technical issue and it is legitimately Elon snapping and just implementing a wildly bad business decision.

But that being said, a loop of users requesting access from Twitter's system is a thing that would burden Twitter's system.

Requesting access and denying access isn't free. You can definitely DDOS your own website by having all of your users repeatedly request access to it in a loop.

So this "unforeseen" loop now eats in the users 600 tweets per whatever, so now when you land and Twitter's homepage you are pass this measly limit with 5 rotations of your scroll wheel.