While everyone’s ready to grab their pitchforks at Matt, this actually sounds somewhat reasonable. Still, given its impact, this could easily be seen as a breach of trust. Definitely a move that's going to stir the pot.
WordPress was the one who injected notices into everyone's dashboard. This started because the WP dashboard shows the blogs from wordpress.org, and then they published this post: https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine/
The result was WP Engine removing the widget that shows wordpress.org blogs on their installs.
PS: isn’t WooCommerce doing the exact same?
I assume you work for automattic, right? I've noticed when it comes to comments like this, normally they're made by automattic employees.
With my own experience of the WP "community", that isn't a surprise.