You don't have to pay and the rate limits are temporary, this was stated at the point they started. It's a big deal to the anti-Musk activists but from a user standpoint it's generally negligible.
More and more accounts are getting off the twitter bandwagon. Clearly it has an impact on users to keep losing features, being asked to pay and now being limited in how many tweets they can read per day. How’s that an improvement for the normal user?
By the way - what is a pro-Musk activist? Someone who corrects false statements on the internet?
Not sure why people aren't making a bigger deal about this. Acres of content were removed from the public web overnight, and people (like journalists) who still treat this like it's some sort of public service seem clueless to this.
Rate limiting is minor compared to that.