People very often work around it by creating a string of tweets to build long(er) form posts. It's mostly arbitrary right now and people who wish to use the service for longer content have to do so in a stupid way.

It's not as though there's an actual limit, it's just an extra step to take if you wish to produce more verbose content.

It was probably a combination of things at the time, but the important question is now, nine years on, is there a better way for Twitter to use its position?

Innovator's dilemma.