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.
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.