You don't need to be very popular to get verified. On Twitch it's really easy to get verified, on twitter you just have to harass them and show you are a real human being, get a couple thousand followers, and they'll throw u a verified symbol.
The issue though is sometimes (rare) people will sell verified accounts to scammers, then you end up with Elon Musk twitter clones with a verification symbol where they're like "Hey im giving away 3,000 free bitcoins!" or some stupid shit.