I have seen similar bugs in the systems I oversee because network libraries love to retry requests without sane limitations by default. But I never saw them make our rate limiters sweat. It's slightly more annoying when they hit an API which actually does some expensive work before returning an error but that's why we have rate limits on all public endpoints.
I also guess that the webapp is the least of Twitters traffic and the native apps probably don't have this problem.
I agree that this is probably not the bug at the root of it all. But I also don't believe the story that Musk is selling for why he's in effect shutting down the site. But both could be true and I'm still thinking about other potential reasons, a complete waste of my time, but it's a weird mental honeypot.
The book "Nothing is true and everything is possible" describes Putin's use of misinformation to maintain control of the populace and eliminate democratic types of politics, but it really feels like it applies here too. There will always be Musk fanbois who will parrot whatever he wants them to say, but most know it's just self-serving BS. And anybody trying to get to the root of everything gets easily sidetracked into narratives that feel right but have zero data backing them, like this bug.
Anyway, highly recommend this book if you want to see a likely path for the future of the US:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_Is_True_and_Everything...
I will note that the few times I investigated claims of Elon lies they were not proper lies, either being misunderstood, misleading (which IS unethical, don't get me wrong), of indeterminate truth value (he said, she said type stuff), delusional optimism or actually true.
Like journalists, Musk rarely outright knowingly makes literally false statements, but this does not mean you should take what he says at face value.
He should have lost that libel case imo as I do think he meant it.