This is a problem for literally every website that isn't completely paywalled. Twitter is not special in this regard.
That was was the story spread far and wide by the Apollo app developer that was believed by the gullible and angry Reddit masses.
But Reddit actually set a reasonable API price, as evidenced by the fact that a year and a half later there are still five 3rd party apps running on reasonable subscriptions:
Infinity For Reddit
Nara For Reddit
Narwhal 2
Now for Reddit
Relay For Reddit
1. Experts can comment, but I think the value of multi person conversational data from forums is uniquely valuable and in short supply relative to just blogposts/news stories on the internet.
2. The absolute economic value of the entire corpus of Twitter is much more valuable than any single boatforum.com like website. So Twitter has a much more incentive to lock itself down than boatforum.com.
No other social media site (besides Reddit) had one. Facebook kind of tried, although theirs was always a lot more limited, and got shut down when it turned out Cambridge Analytica used it for widespread election fraud[1].
Both Twitter and Reddit did basically the same thing at roughly the same time, Twitter just had the misfortune to be under the control of Elon Musk, so the move was perceived as ideological.
[1] As it later turned out, Cambridge Analytica was basically a "nothing burger", they claimed to be able to accomplish a lot while, in reality, accomplishing very little. The damage to interoperability was already done, though.
What CA did show was that Facebook's statements about protecting user privacy were fundamentally incompatible with the way their API worked, so they had to shut it down because the alternative would have been to just sort of... Let it hang in the air that it wasn't hard for a third-party to build a system to completely bypass user intent in scoping their information.
(I had the misfortune of trying to write a Facebook app about fifteen years prior, and that was my takeaway at the time also... "Do people, like, realize that their whole process for protecting scraping the social network via third-party app integration is the honor system?" Turns out people didn't).
That sentiment goes back pretty far in Facebook's history
[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/mark-zuckerberg-branded-early-fac...
For those unaware, Mastodon's APIs are extremely open and it's very easy to scrape, to the point of providing you with a "firehose" of all public posts that an instance sees, both local and federated, with no authentication required. They also have an extreme anti-scraping culture, anybody who admits to running any kind of scraper which is not strictly opt-in, even for benign / scientific purposes, is very quickly shunned and blocked. Most instances also have a "disallow scraping via robots.txt" policy by default.
The results? I posted a canary token[1] link on a medium-sized, well-federated, well-protected instance which disallows scraping, and it got hit by some shady social media crawler in a fraction of a second. It started getting hit by many other strange crawlers later on, and it still keeps getting visits (mostly from Google now).
And I don't know what to tell them, because that's not how the internet has ever worked.