My take is that it's a Trojan horse meant to handle a multiple potential competitors, the Fediverse being one of them. Meta tries to either take over or kill competitors: they purchased Instagram for fear of competing with it; they purchased Whatsapp; they considered purchasing TikTok and then when they didn't, they instead funded the push to malign it and ban it. This is all in addition to all the other things they've done (like manipulating teens' emotional states without their or their parents' consent, building shadow profiles for non-Facebook users, using a free data usage counter as a Trojan horse to figure out what apps people were using and then purchase one of the popular ones... WhatsApp, and the previously mentioned alleged warcrimes to name a few).

We agree that Meta Inc. has no moral scruples and buckets of money. Where we disagree is that I think that not only does the corporation have no moral scruples, I think they actively use their lack of morality to snuff out competition using what ever means possible and then shape opinion to make a profit. If Threads were just a client like Memmy, Jerboa, or Tusky it would be different, but it's not.

Edit: added a clause changed some formatting.