If I had to guess, its a combination of 1) people skimming are looking for the twitter UI 2) a backup in case the tweet gets removed 3) embedded tweets can brea

If I had to guess, its a combination of 1) people skimming are looking for the twitter UI 2) a backup in case the tweet gets removed 3) embedded tweets can break in browsers with issues or javascript disabled 4) both text and screenshot combined are best for accessibility and screen readers and translation I think the best case solution is a server side service that archives the tweet and renders it directly into the html, not as an embed, that then gracefully overlays the embed over, so you can see accurate retweets and hearts, but will degrade back to just showing the content as text. One thing I cant stand about the modern web is how screenshots of text have become a defacto standard, because they preserve formatting and are require no technical know-how.