Not to really smart VCs. The ones with the long view rather than in-and-out-in-3-years-or-less.

Even then, you need a business model.

Gitlab has a clear business model that works just fine even with the decentralized nature of Git. Nothing Twitter has tried to make money works at all if decentralized, or even if other people build clients for the same central server.

That's absolutely true. But note how gitlab has made a product around git, even though git itself is free.

There are quite a few products that twitter could have made around twitter itself that they never even looked at. At the same time, their costs are exorbitantly high (see 'whatsapp' for a company that gets this right).

I don't think the situation for Twitter is as hopeless as it seems, but then again, I don't run Twitter so maybe that's just my naive optimism.