That's an interesting fantasy, but, Twitter's "design" originates from being nothing more than a simplistic broadcast SMS tool where every message had to fit in

That's an interesting fantasy, but, Twitter's "design" originates from being nothing more than a simplistic broadcast SMS tool where every message had to fit in an SMS including the username/command part as originally SMS was the primary way people used Twitter. After that, nearly every single aspect of Twitter was actually invented by its users including @ replies, and mechanisms for "threading." All that Twitter has done is ride that user behavior by slightly conforming to it through actions like UI trying to follow threads via text relationships, or eventually adding actual reply metadata to tweets. And the increase in messages size? That came with a huge backlash from many of its users. To imply that Twitter has somehow cleverly engineered the dumpster fire that burns everlasting there is giving them FAR, FAR more credit than they deserve.