This does show you the fallacy in your line of thinking, right? Twitter was on that list, and now it's not. In 5 years, maybe none of the companies in your list will be in it; sure you will easily find "replacements" that are just as popular/well known, but the thing is that that's exactly the model: "grow aggressively, capture the market, become profitable once you're market leader". It doesn't always work, but it's hard to dispute that it sometimes works, and when it does, it yields tremendous profits. It's not a bug, it's a feature :)

But 53M is not much for a decade of business at that scale. For the size of some of these VC investments they could just put it into the market and get similar returns, I'd think?

The VCs made their (large) returns on the share price of Twitter, not anything to do with profits Twitter made.

Profits are just money a company has been unable to invest in growth.

Twitter hasn't captured the market, but has become only slightly profitable compared to its industry peers. Meanwhile Doordash or Deliveroo or Uber could capture entire markets, but that would rapidly make them prone to regulation or outright bans.