An acquaintance of mine was also suspended due to “inauthentic behavior.” probably still suspended even now. [2]
Money. Lots of money. Pay the Advertising chuds. Back before reserved/paid usernames were even a thing I remember at least one recorded phone call kicking around one of my archives of a Twitter employee saying they'd release any handle I needed for a $10k ad commit over 3 months minimum pre-Musk.
They do read the appeals. I know this because I was falsely permanently suspended, without lawful reasons and without prior notice, with an account in good standing, a few years ago.
After writing several appeals over the years, in which I even mentioned article 19 of the UN UDHR (which pretty much mentions everyone has the right of freedom of expression and freedom of speech), and after receiving several rejections with the standard boilerplate text I got a very angry human written reply from somebody working at the Safety and Security team mentioning amongst other things I should never try to appeal again, and that they would automatically reject every appeal if I would. Or at least, that was basically the gist of it.
And I tried it once afterwards, and they didn't lie about that.
This was after the purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk, by the way.
So yes, they do read appeals (even before the Elon purchase likely). But they don't care.