On the plus side, signal to noise is about to skyrocket on Twitter.
API monitoring stops bad actors; doesn't matter much if you extract the creds from a binary blob if the usage pattern begins to deviate from the norm, invalidating the creds and forcing a creds cycle.
API access is now effectively for ancillary or supporting tools.
Not knocking it, it makes sense from a platform integrity perspective. It is what it is.
Most bot farms have a LOT of dev accounts, multiple apps, ways to automatically create an app, etc.
This is not a solution against bots.
When maintaining an army of bots becomes more expensive than the amount of money they are making from it, they will stop doing it.
There's an upper bound to "bot complexity"; that being the complexity you want to impose on a normal user. For many sites (e.g. instagram) it's often easier to just "pretend to be a normal user" and hit it from a headless browser. You lose some functionality, but at least for my needs, that's always been a sufficient fallback.
As such, I've always been of the opinion that the primary function of API limitations is to punish/limit/extract more money from the good participants.
I have a few twitter accounts:
one where I follow people I know and devs and it's very noisy. It's nearly unusable, it's full of political rants, even from well known devs, angry tweets, just not very useful. I don't read it much.
The other twitter account I follow people who write funny tweets, and that account is a goldmine. I love it. I like almost every tweet. Nobody follows this account, it's just like a read only twitter and it's amazing.
I have a third twitter account for local news, I follow the local fire department, police, local news, local businesses, and it's also super great.
Twitter's android app makes it easy to switch between accounts, it's basically just like different feeds.