It's probably so that people don't accidentally publish something they intended to DM by tapping the spacebar twice after the command. It'd still imagine it should be allowed from a full keyboard, at least.
Nice idea, but 'internal server error' (per the linked tweet, didn't try it) isn't exactly a good reaction. IF someone thought that this might make sense, the result should not/would not be a 500..
yes, absolutely! It has to be this. Plus, a tiny little period is really hard to miss on mobile (where the shortcut you mention applies). it's almost justified.
"d. something" is not the only offender. I suspect it's a badly written parser. "m. anything" also breaks. And for fun, without the following word ("something"), the tweet just vanishes with no error at all.
I tried all of the non-space non-alphanumeric characters on my keyboard. Some worked, most caused an error.