I know that it's discourteous to write-off a potentially valuable project because the release post showed a lack of self-awareness, but I think it's indicative of the larger struggle taking place: that trust is decaying.

It's decaying for a lot of the reasons displayed in the post, like you described, but the post also:

  - is overlong (probably LLM assisted)
  - is self-congratulatory
  - boosts AI
  - rewrites an existing project (vs contributing to the original)
  - conjures long-term maintenance doubt/suspicions
  - is functionally an advertisement (for CloudFlare)

So yeah, maybe EmDash is revolutionary with respect to Wordpress, but it hasn't signaled trust, and that's a difficult hurdle to get past.