He basically tried taking a post-it note with "X.com" written on it and stuck it on top of anything he saw that said "twitter.com" without actually fixing it.

for a second i thought you were talking about chapo chat lmfao

I'll bet that a lot of the devs that managed backend tooling are gone now and their scripts just won't work with "x.com" as the domain name.

The fact that they're essentially overwriting url hyperlinks instead of swapping domains shows that there's some sort of major bitrot happening behind the curtain.

This is a branding move. He wants the name "x.com" to show up more.

The rewritten url still hyperlinks to "twitter.com" and "x.com" still redirects to "twitter.com"

They didn't want to change domain names because that's a nightmare for backend tooling. I'll bet there's over a decade of internal tools that check for "twitter.com" in some response or something.

was a successful rebranding even though they tried their best to keep the same ingredients

Comparable to this? I honestly cannot imagine. This situation would be like if Kleenex had tried to rebrand themself as "A" or something. Like the joke about Kleenex is its brand name is so known and superfluous that even generic tissues are called "kleenex". That's ubiquity you frankly can't buy for any amount of money. People used "tweet" in casual fucking conversation for gods sake and the fucking petulant idiot king just flushed it down the toilet. Breathtaking.

I still call this place chapo chat

the only half-decent execution of this I can think of is Datsun becoming Nissan

//TODO: add comments

The concern is that scammers can create fake phishy versions of sites that end in "__x.com" as ___twitter.com to trick Twitter users into divulging passwords or other sensitive info. Because to the Twitter user it'll look like the genuine site that ends with __x.com on the Twitter app but it won't actually be.

Some examples of sites already made to prevent scammers from using them are:
Netflitwitter, Ametwitter, Fedetwitter, and Roblotwitter, dot com, which falsely showed as Netflix, Amex, FedEx, and Roblox, dot com.
Though I think they (xitter programmers) already manually added exceptions for the examples that trended which stopped that from happening, for those specific examples.

The problem is that you can make websites that end in twitter. An example used in the article is someone makes a site called "netflitwitter.com" and posts a link to it on twitter. Twitter will now display it as "netflix.com" and if you click it it sends you to "netflitwitter.com"

Twitter is now a phishing paradise, in other words.