You mean to tell me that you can't actually run a tech company with three engineers and a Mac Mini?
Now obviously firing entire teams changes that metric some. Probably why there's been some high profile outages like MFA. But most companies can sacrifice large portions of their workforce if they only want to maintain the status quo.
The problem is that Twitter organized itself as an overstaffed company, with complex structures, complex code, lots of R&D, etc... Than Elon Musk came in and did a Thanos snap and immediately fired half of the workforce, and I guess quite a few others left, especially among the best who would have an easy way finding a good job elsewhere. But while the workforce was drastically reduced, the complexity of the system wasn't reduced and probably never will. So, you get what happens now.
It is possible to run a Twitter-like website with much less resources than Twitter had before Elon Musk bought it, but you can't run Twitter as it is now.
From people that ensure your Kelloggs ads don't appear below literal neonazi movies, to people that close deals on large advertising campaigns, to people that ensure the place where those ads appear (Twitter, the product) actually keeps running.
https://joinmastodon.org/de/about
Four.
The Monthly Active Users (MAUs) per engineer for Twitter is approximately 600,000, while for Mastodon it's around 280,000.
Only one good programmer could probably create a clone.
Of course the scale matters, but it’s not like you’d be writing an OS.