Being verified made you trustworthy in the sense that it signified that Twitter trusted the account. If you trusted Twitter, then you could sort of infer a kind of trust relationship with that account, in that it was trusted by an authority you trust.

Getting verified was just a popularity/insider contacts game, for sure. But now that trust relationship is sort of up for grabs, and there are a litany of people who (at a glance) will trust accounts with that mark if they see posts from them. This is ripe for exploitation by bad actors.