they broke tons of stuff with Gutenberg/block editor and didn't seem to be bothered by backwards compat

Not only did they break classic WordPress stuff, but they also keep breaking Gutenberg APIs at a really frustrating rate.

It’s clear that the core WordPress developers have a very different idea of project stewardship than the Gutenberg devs do.

Fair enough. The way they added Gutenberg was a complete mess. Like yeah, the idea is a good one, and the editor can be pretty good if used correctly. But the way it was built was certainly not ideal, and was probably the worst of all worlds. Felt like someone saw SquareSpace and co, thought WordPress was falling behind and decided to push for those features to be added as quickly and inefficiently as possible.