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All it means is that someone verified their identity. They are generally for people that have shown people try to copy their profile to fool others.

Nothing to do with popularity, that correlation comes from the likelyhood of impersonation.

But yes, also vanity.

People were absolutely getting verified because they knew somebody who worked at Twitter. Old boy gang stuff.

Or on the other hand refuses to verify very well known people such as Assange.

I know verified people who were in the JS / webdev scene in 2010 and are verified because they knew someone who worked at Twitter.

This parody is so accurate it hurts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ni8CpIJpmqw ('how twitter verification works' by Gus Johnson)

…why? It ought to just mean they had their ID verified. That’s it.