There's no way they cause more damage than what they have done now. The vast majority of users (and eyes on ads, etc) are not going to have accounts. The majority of accounts that might pay money only do so because lots of people (who may not be logged in) see them.
That doesn't explain it IMO. That data is already freely available and LLMs don't need the latest data. So data scraping for AI makes up a miniscule amount of API usage.
I think it has more to do with inflation. Investors aren't putting their money into risky tech companies as much, and so these companies (twitter, reddit, etc) have to prove they can be profitable for once, and they probably are going to fail to do this. It does mean we can't have nice things for free anymore like API access.
Does it rub anyone else the wrong way that you need to have an invite code to use bluesky? I wanted to use it but it just screams elitism to me.
Musk claimed that it's temporary. Either way this is an absolute disaster. This must be costing them insane amounts of money.