I was under the impression this was an intentional dark pattern to get users to sign up / log in to twitter? The reason I believe this is because if you get that failure and back out and click the link again it works 100% of the time.
I would think that your first visit loaded a resource/set a state somewhere which let's the second visit go through.
Much more likely to be a programming error then a purposeful decision by a PO as the end result is objectively terrible. I cannot imagine anyone getting convinced to register to a webpage that cannot even load. It's not that content is hidden behind a pop-up or anything, it just errors out (at least for me, but I'm not the parent comment author)
GTA online has had slow loading times for years until a fan reverse engineered the game to find a bad serialization issue which basically created a n*n computation.
Some issues are fucking hard to detect and an initial page load breakage that only happens sometimes (likely a race condition that cannot be replicated in testing) is an example of that