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I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I think that almost everyone at some point in their career has had a bad manager. And sometimes our reaction to that is to say that no one should be making decisions. There should be no managers, sort of like a more reactionary approach to it because that is true that it does solve the problem of the bad manager.

I think what we miss is the only thing worse than a bad manager is 100 bad managers, which is sometimes what we get when we just try to make decisions or drive development of something like WordPress–which is, at the end of the day, a user product based on who shows up to a dev meeting that day, or what the loudest voices in the room might advocate for.

Even policies that we’ve adopted in the past with WordPress, let’s say the 80/20 rule, which is on our principles page, can be misused and, I think, probably have been misused more the past few years than it has been used in the way it was intended.

Just that kind of getting back to the question of how does this change a user’s life or not, and that reflects itself in an open marketplace through adoption. That is, I think, good to just remind ourselves of regularly because everyone, myself included, can get kind of down in the weeds of a particular ticket or idea we have or idea someone else has that might not be productive.

— Matt Mullenweg, quoted in https://wptavern.com/matt-mullenweg-discusses-core-focuses-downsides-of-a-consensus-driven-model-and-more-on-apply-filters-podcast

BTW: Matt prolly meant https://wordpress.org/about/philosophy/#clean 😉