You don’t understand how blue checkmarks make their owners feel. To them they are changing the world one smarmy tweet at a time. Blue checkmarks validate everything they say since it is a privilege bestowed upon them by giant corporation Twitter themselves.
The new blue hex is just that, but in keeping with the times.
I wrote a whole essay on it during a hackathon in SF: https://medium.com/hackmentalhealth/why-twitter-should-verif...
But saying that only relatively famous people deserve proactive protection doesn't strike me as a great look. Yes, well-known people are more likely to be targeted and the effects are likely to be greater but I'm not sure that's a justification for withholding verification from everyone else.
I don't get it either why they're holding back. I'm at some point where I want someone to make a twitter like platform with mostly if not exclusively verified people, I hope twitter does it but I doubt it, so I hope someone else will. I can get really tired of interacting with people wearing masks or people wearing masks of other people's faces.