> Why would blocking people from viewing the TL on the home page cause Twitter more stress?
If you block stuff somewhere in the microservie hell in the backend, but forget to update the frontend code properly, and everything was built with the assumption that authentication and authorization is not a thing, and suddenly it is, there's bound to be craploads of stuff that can start spamming network requests.
I don’t think ‘built with the assumption that authentication and authorisation is not a thing’ is the best description. Requests from logged in users would already need to be authenticated to see private accounts they follow. It’s more just the client having aggressive retry logic in the case of whatever rate limit responses they’re getting.
If you block stuff somewhere in the microservie hell in the backend, but forget to update the frontend code properly, and everything was built with the assumption that authentication and authorization is not a thing, and suddenly it is, there's bound to be craploads of stuff that can start spamming network requests.