Under no circumstances do you "gotta hand it to them", but Musk took the private beta, US-only Birdwatch, renamed it to something less cute (but ultimately a more pragmatic name), and launched it more broadly.
I think the point is that while he doesn't really deserve credit for developing the project, he was in charge when it was rolled out. He could have easily killed the beta project as having failed or a leftover project from the people that used to be there.
Sure, he can get credit for not making a bad decision in this case and defaulting to a good outcome. (He met the minimum benchmark a product manager would be expected to do, but let's not overstate his part)
Alas, twitter is has never been like "every single company", and I presume it would have languished in it's pre-musk state for many more years before it got cancelled.
I don't see any reason to think so. As an early Birdwatch/CN contributor and also a long-time user of the API, I've always thought their back end stuff was pretty great. API v2 also rolled out pre-Musk and was actually great until he crippled it with absurd limits. I'm not going to pay thousand$ for the privilege of churning out free network analysis; last time I checked you could only collect 1500 tweets/month before a very expensive meter started running on your API calls.
And if you actually open the App Store rules link, it says "To prevent abuse, apps with user-generated content or social networking services must include [...] The ability to block abusive users from the service". As in, X needs the ability to ban users from X.
It seems to me like community notes are a great way to push whatever reactionary narrative someone manages to cook up when they oppose the person tweeting / the topic at hand.
It's a good way to push any "status quo" narrative. Community Notes present themselves as true, so naturally people don't question the things that they link to. I've seen posts before where many incorrect Community Notes come and go on that same post.
It is the standard internet psychology: someone says something that seems dubious or they are generally a dubious person, a "sensible" person or agency (Community Notes) comes along with a lot of popular support to offer a rebuttal, a vast majority then assume the latter is true without bothering to check. The act of professional sounding, assumedly popular rebuttal, given with sources, is enough for people to accept a random thing as a fact. Almost no one checks the sources.
.. but perfectly reasonable if you're trying to avoid being embroiled in political agitprop campaigns by known bad faith actors whose money you nevertheless enjoy receiving ..