According to Automattic they had been in discussions for 20 months. Your anger should be with WPEngine for taking your money while knowing full well their service depended on servers ran by a company they were on (best case) shaky terms with.
Up until about 8 months ago, Bluehost (another big paid hoster of WordPress sites) ran its own plugin mirror with no issues: https://github.com/bluehost/pluginmirror
They could have give a warning 20 months ago that this may happen and then this would not be a thing.
Or is the 20 months thing just completely irrelevant to the point that Automattic should've given a heads up before cutting off plug-in updates
I mean yeah, companies should have contingency plans for things that are extraordinarily rare but let's be reasonable about it. No one, including you, saw this coming.
I challenge you to find a single blog post, tweet or HN/Reddit comment that suggests Matt could one day shut off wp.org access to a single company running 1.5 million sites without any notice to that company, or the community members who will be affected. It's unconscionable. Or at least it was.
Be reasonable.
https://wordpressfoundation.org/trademark-policy/#:~:text=If....
It's a very nuanced thing. The world could be very different today. There would have been very little pushback against Matt's crusade if he'd just thought about making sure service to users was uninterrupted.
Instead he dragged 1.5 million sites into the middle of this in a way that made him look like the bad guy.
I hope that WordPress will continue to be open and Matt will continue to lead it, but he just cost himself a lot mindshare. That's why I asked him to explain why he made the choice he did.
Hopefully he has a PR person who is advising him on how to handle this situation. Were it me, I would say something like: "My passion for keeping WordPress open source got the better of me and I made a hasty decision which caused problems for end users. I've learned from this and it's not a mistake I will ever repeat. Going forward if there are changes to how we administer WPorg's services we will discuss them with the community and announce them well in advance because we want them to be rock solid and reliable for all of the millions of websites which depend on them."
This type of statement would go over well with a lot of people including the big enterprise customers who are depending on WP, who Matt really wants and who are constantly being courted by WP's competitors. In followup messaging you can reiterate all the strengths of open source e.g. how it reduces vendor lock-in.
But what do I know, I've only sold a couple million dollars worth of WP contracts, meanwhile Matt is worth 400 of those big M's. :)