For what it’s worth I was also unable to reproduce this. I’ve tried scanning but not clicking, AirDropping, iMessage, adding to Photos library, getting the url from Photos library… nothing triggered as a page visit.

Relatedly, searching for the url in my photos library does not return the picture as a result, indicating that the scanning is not being used for indexing currently. I was trying to test with other QR codes that I happened to have in my photos library, but every one of them has the website name in the picture.

I will keep the files on my computer and continue monitoring but I am becoming very skeptical of the Twitter thread author’s methodology.