I have no real insight. I do know that I am a big fan of Bluesky/atproto and post about it fairly regularly, and enjoy being friendly with the devs. They verified just over 200 accounts, and most of them are news organizations and their employees, and the rest are programmers who regularly use the site and/or engage with the protocol.

I think this makes sense, because 1. most people want this sort of feature for news and 2. the kinds of people they verified technically are likely to play around with it and see how sound it is, which is who I'd want to be kicking the tires.

I'm not sure when they'll verify more people, but this is only the beginning, for sure.