Sure, but also a relic of the time of its inception. The usefulness of the limit was technical and is now cultural.

People very often work around it by creating a string of tweets to build long(er) form posts. It's mostly arbitrary right now and people who wish to use the service for longer content have to do so in a stupid way.

It's not as though there's an actual limit, it's just an extra step to take if you wish to produce more verbose content.

It's the root of what identifies Twitter and there is value in consuming 140 char tweets. Twitter is not for everyone and shouldn't try to be. That will be its demise though as investors demand that it become more like Facebook and more power users leave the platform. Soon, only the bots and marketers will be posting regularly.

"Perhaps" and "so far" are sort of the keywords here.

It was probably a combination of things at the time, but the important question is now, nine years on, is there a better way for Twitter to use its position?

Innovator's dilemma.