Wow, how did we get from "hey, here's a cool project to help make sure the top 5,000 plugins are compatible with Gutenberg" to "Gutenberg is being forced on everyone, and will potentially break the majority of those top 5,000 plugins"?

No one will be forced to use Gutenberg: https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic-editor/

At any rate, this sounds like a great project and, believe it or not, many of those top 5,000 plugins are developed by competent folks who test new features and releases well before they are released to the general public.

In case any of those devs have their heads buried in the sand, they usually also get an email in advance of a WP release too. So the sky isn't going to fall... not today anyway :)

Is it scary to face a huge change like this? You bet! But should we give up all the benefits it brings because it is scary? I sure hope not...