https://mullenweg.wtf/ picked up after that

Hey, that's me! Unfortunately that's only reasonably complete through mid-February of 2025; i had some health issues and was never able to catch back up.

Hope you’re doing better these days!

That lead me to a number of good sources, especially this:

https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/09/24/automattic-vs-wp-engine/

which links to a lot more

I already knew Matt was throwing a tantrum and refusing to address conflicts of interest. However WP Engine also do not come out of it looking good. Nor do a lot of people in the WP community. Matt is a problem, but it does not look like he is the only problem.

The Wordpress community got so big, that inevitably it attracted leeches. Unfortunately, Matt chose to address a home-infestation problem with a firethrower.

Great way to put it. Ignoring collateral damage too.

There is also this video that dropped last week if people are interested.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC8zIESRyVs

" WordPress powers about 41% of the internet. It took Matt Mullenweg twenty years to build that. It took him about ninety days in 2024 to lose the trust of the community he built it with — the agencies, plugin developers, hosts, and translators who bet their businesses on the update button still working next Friday. This is the full timeline: how a blog fork in 2003 became a movement, how Automattic became a company, how WP Engine became the target, and how one keynote at WordCamp US turned into cease and desists, lawsuits, forked plugins, mass resignations, and a preliminary injunction "

The community was already starting to turn on Matt well before 2024. He's appointed himself release manager for every version of WP since 5.0 in 2018, which is how Gutenberg managed to land in core in such a half-baked state.