It’s interesting that you say that while using a French word like “cliché”. Maybe it was intentional from you? :-D
And maybe reducing not having a strong French influence to not having a wine/bread/cheese culture is, you know, reductionist?

It seems that before Instagram’s Threads was launched, threads.net was just a domain name parked for sale with GoDaddy’s domain auction service Afternic: https://web.archive.org/web/20221115220239/http://threads.net/

So I guess Meta just paid whatever they were asking to be paid?