You neglect to consider that these social media websites were giant bait & switches - they were open-access to trick people into going there and making them popular, and only when they got enough network-effect lock-in, did they turn hostile. Morally equivalent to fraud.
this entire thing is about people that aren't even users of the service.
Users were affected in exactly the same way. And every user - i.e. poster - was first just a visitor. Much fewer would have become posters if they'd been greeted by a login wall that wanted an e-mail and phone-number.
i don't think there is a page on x that just gives you a login wall that a normal non-logged in user would go to. if you link to something like a tweet or a profile page it shows you them. these services are for scraping.
Don't lie. When not logged in, if you visit someone's profile, X shows you only 5 tweets. If you visit a tweet, only 3 replies are visible. It's not "scraping" (which is perfectly fine and legal to scrape public content by the way) - you cannot read conversations or follow someone's posts in any meaningful capacity without logging in.
it is legal if you can do it, doesn't mean they have to like it. keeping features for logged in seems super reasonable to me.
"features" for logging in is in a broad sense reasonable.
When one of those features is being able to see the most recent tweets from an account, that's asinine.
In other words: If you link to a profile page, X doesn't properly show you. It gives you a random selection of popular tweets that person has made, often several years old.