This isn’t entirely true. Verification on Mastodon isn’t verifying your account for a shiny badge, it’s verifying ownership of sites that you link on your profile. If you add a link to a website, and that website links back to your profile, Mastodon will show that one link as verified. But that link needs a special rel="me" attribute to count for verification, which is what Threads now supports.

I am absolutely sure Threads is an attempt at EEE, but this specific feature is a good thing imo. I’d love to see more sites support rel=me links for simple cross-platform account (ownership) verification