[rmccue]

WordPress has never internalised the ideas of API-first development or the ability to have a lightweight core, and to this day it’s still treated as an addon piece that could someday be removed.

(Source: I wrote the REST API in WordPress and lead the API team for many years.)

[chiefalchemist]

Exactly. Let's make removable the piece that is the most industry standard compliant. The pieces that maximizes the flexibility of "the appliance". If GB came first, I'd agree with you. As we know, it did not.

But instead let's force feed - oops, I mean ship - and bake in a product (i.e., GB) that was half-baked technology implementation and barely an afterthought in terms of user experience. (Note: UX in this case includes all the devs who were begged to jump on board, and then jerked around like a puppy on the leash.)

WP core should be a service. Lean, tight and clean. Tightly coupling more and more likely unnecessary features to that doesn't help anyone. Trying to maintain that monolith is overly complicated. And so on.

We have the plugin architecture. If it's broken, then let's fix it. If it needs some sort of dependency manager, then let's talk about thst as well.

But Gutenberg? That makes 2020 look like a summer holiday, and we all know how bad 2020 has been :)