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Perhaps I missed something, but I wonder why WP didn't just include ACF functionality in WP Core from the very beginning?

Why fight in public when you can just commoditize your dependant competitor?

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WordPress's core dev team has had a longstanding aversion to including "unnecessary" features in the core to avoid bloat, with the idea that plugins can take care of any gaps in functionality.

It sounds like a reasonable philosophy until you see just how many basic CMS features it's missing and subsequently how many sites are running 20+ poorly-coded plugins that spam the dashboard notifications and have numerous PHP vulnerabilities.

Those 20 poorly written plugins make a good amount of money though, which is why many of those plugins' creators and affiliated "wordpress influencers" also do an outstanding job pushing the sentiment against more integrations into the core.

Leadership is short sighted and not acting rationally.

Doing as you said is much smarter, but maybe takes a bit longer. My guess is Matt was reaching for some way to "hit them back" quickly.

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