My conspiracy theory on this is that Twitter Blue isn't doing well so they're doubling down on ad revenue.
Public likes disincentvise interactions, which is one metric that could be used to measure engagement, so hiding likes, along side their recent policy changes about NSFW stuff, is a way to encourage more engagement towards attention grabbing content that users were otherwise not inclined to interact with.
Economically comfortable (until very recently maybe), smug middle class lefties using harmful stereotypes to punch down on conservative voters has been a long running embarrassment to the political landscape.
The demographic these jokes target often have the least amount of freedom to spend on being politically engaged and figuring out who is actually in their best interest, which is why they usually end up voting for a strong personality like Trump and the right's bias towards the Christian inspired philosophy.
When the left space fills it's self with explicitly elitist, classist, and exclusionary rhetoric like this just so they can all sit around a jerk each other off about how much more smarter they are, they only end up pushing them furtherer away from learning about the left and developing a more nuanced and informed political world-view. If you don't have a lot of time to spend on yourself, are you going to waste it surrounding your self with people who constantly blabber about how much they hate you and think your a incestuous degenerate drug addict invalid?
They're not marketing to kids becuase:
A) it's illegal in some countries
B) It should rightfully be looked down on
Probably good that a junk food merchant isn't marketing to kids to heavily.
W fart free water
Basically it's allowed but they must properly mark it as NSFW, so it can be filtered out for minors and people who are actively trying to avoid it. More or less they're making the sharing of adult material a more legitimate thing for twitter, which is kinda hard to tell because twitter has always been filled with porn but I guess it's just more official.
Wherever or not people will actually mark their content as NSFW or if Twitter will enforce it is in the air. I've seen Twitter content sensitivity setting used more for video game spoilers than it's actual intended use.