Tweets are delicious candy. When you eat candies it comes with packaging and a wrapper, like the twitter website interface. API allows software to access the candy without the wrapper or packaging. If Elon removes direct candy access for the bots and other software, the bots will instead take packaged candy. When the bot removes the wrapper from the candy, we call this scraping. The candy packaging is useless to the bot because it just wants the candy. The extra candy packaging is going to cost twitter more money.

API is a way for software to access website data in a block of data. When a human visits a website, there is all sorts of html, css, javascript that gets interpreted by the web browser and makes the website data visually readable for humans. A computer program just wants a block of data, ex: the twitter handle, the tweet text, the tweet time stamp, etc. If a bot can't access an API, it will resort to web scraping, that is loading the full page and extracting whatever data they want from it. Full page loads use much more data than API requests and will cost most bandwidth fees to twitter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/API
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping