Until you untangle the confusion there, you can't design a product that makes any sense.
The misconception was coming from inside the building. Ostensibly the blue check was a security feature, but it was also used as a positive signal when ranking content. Blue users could also see a separate notification feed of only other Blue users. And so on.
This is (in my opinion) why they slowed down verifications to a crawl, because they realized it shouldn't necessarily lead to boosted importance, and that it certainly wouldn't scale if they opened up identity verification to everyone instead of just "famous people".
So like every other half-baked feature that remained only partially rolled out for years, or features that were briefly available and then were hidden altogether, they just sat on it in fear of making any changes at all.
It turns out to be important to know which is the official Eli Lilly account, and at some point it was deemed important to know who was a news reporter, rather than someone attempt to trade on the reputation of a newspaper to support their own opinions.
Verifying everyone is definitely missing the point of verification.
Well, the correct move would be to actual verify people. Just taking their money means nothing.
It becomes an arbitrary status symbol eventually.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/28/elon-musk-says-only-verified...
I've seen a bunch of people basically bent out of shape because Twitter essentially didn't see them as important enough, based on whatever arbitrary algorithm, to give them a blue check.
I was also turned down in spite of having an impersonation attempt (which I did get banned) and writing publicly on a regular basis. I didn't really care but I understand that some do. I doubt I'd pay a monthly fee so long as the site was generally usable.
Well there you go, that's a status symbol in our society. A recognizable face or name, at least in their field, is the ultimate strive for many people.