In reply to John Blackbourn.

And yet we get things like this (from the recent post on recommended PHP versions):

Mullenweg has made it clear that he will not use WordPress’ marketshare to force webhosting companies to upgrade to PHP 7 but rely on established relationships instead.

It can't be both ways. Either Matt and Automattic can make decisions and proclamations like this... or they can't. Obviously there's no legal weight to this - the project *could* tell Matt to piss off - but the practical reality is that what Matt and Automattic do and say has real weight on the project as a whole.