Many software are like that, especially those that have been around for some time. You don't see the CEO of Microsoft spewing nonsense about Windows publicly, and then punching down on an employee for correcting him. There is no need for the circus. Technical debt is a fact of business, it can be dealt with professionally. It's not a reason to treat people badly.
The product is especially bad. The new CEO is trying to reform it. Eric is saying "spend more," which is the refuge of bad architecture. That's not the answer. And instead of privately working together to review it, he's publicly arguing. I wouldn't accept that either.
He called Musk's public statement out, because it was wrong. Twitter shouldn't be the place for this, but it's on Musk for creating such unprofessional atmosphere in the first place.
Imagine the same thing with Microsoft. We all know Windows is held together with scotch tape, not to mention that 7 years after Windows 10 they still haven't quite manage to unify the old and the new interfaces, not that Windows 11's new interfaces are any good. What a mess. Except it's not, it's business as usual. Big software projects are messy and hard to manage, but these issues are unimportant when you get the bigger picture right. For Windows the bigger picture is that it runs all your application. This is what makes Windows a good product, the rest is details and can be fixed over time. Preferably in a professional manner.
How is Musk trying to 'reform' it when since he's owned it Twitter has had worse performance than ever, degraded features due to his bull-headed decisions and is literally burning money because he's chasing advertisers?
And the only one that started a public argument was Musk by making an incorrect claim and defacto blaming the engineers for something he clearly doesn't understand. He's trying to pull another Paypal and it's blowing up in his face now like it did then.