Say what you will about Twitter, but is a globally distributed database with trillions of entries, which has to add and sort and display billions of those entries in real-time for 100+ million daily active users. And it has to resist nation-state bad actors doing everything they can to corrupt it.
As a result, I would guess a lot of Twitter's engineers are working on infrastructure, internal tooling, and moderation.
Regarding your example, doubling the size of a tweet, that was probably more work than one dev writing ALTER TABLE tweets MODIFY tweet_text VARCHAR(280). In fact, I don't know if you were around 20 years ago or so, but there was a similarly scoped project to double the number of digits we were storing the year in. ;)
Would you want to date someone who seemed desperate to get into a relationship? Who seemed like they were having trouble getting a relationship at all, let alone a good healthy one? Same principle.
Since these are riffs on fizzbuzz, the goal is just to evaluate whether a candidate can use programming to solve these at all, i.e. whether they can 1) think through how to accomplish a basic task with some data and code, and 2) implement it in a language they know.
The goal of fizzbuzz in a phone screen should not be to see if someone can solve it in an optimal memory-efficient framework-idiomatic way. Clever syntax and data structure use is lovely, but these are really about finding whether someone can use a 'for' loop and an 'if' condition.
For what it's worth, protected branches are pretty clearly listed as a "Github Pro" feature in their pricing page.
I agree that it'd be nice if they warned you about features you're using that will be turned off, but I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that people requesting downgrades understand which features are in which plan.
Maybe this could be suggested to GitHub's Paperclips project, to avoid future confusion?
As a result, I would guess a lot of Twitter's engineers are working on infrastructure, internal tooling, and moderation.
Regarding your example, doubling the size of a tweet, that was probably more work than one dev writing ALTER TABLE tweets MODIFY tweet_text VARCHAR(280). In fact, I don't know if you were around 20 years ago or so, but there was a similarly scoped project to double the number of digits we were storing the year in. ;)