[hifromwork]

>this also appears like a convenient way to obscure the fact that certain tweets with a large number of likes are being artificially juiced by bot accounts

I'm not sure. You will (AFAIU) still able to check who liked a particular tweet, so you can check suspicious tweets for bot activity. But you won't be able to pivot and check which tweets were liked by a (suspected) bot account.

It's bad day for transparency, but this is not completely unlike other platforms (for example: I can't check the list of google docs you have access to, but I can check a list of people who have access to the google doc I have opened)