@Gary thank you very much for a thoughtful response.

I only want to expand a bit on 3 points you've made.

I think there’s an important distinction to be made between the practical, legal effect of the patent grant [...]

Agree on the distinctions you make but even assuming the legal effect of the clause, or the philosophical point about it, the license also had a very real practical consequence in forcing some businesses to employ legal counsel in order to make those determinations for themselves, while leaving those without the resources or presence of mind at a disadvantaged position.

Every corporation will have politics that we disagree with, judging their projects through that lens just means we’re cutting off all possible avenues to help change those politics.

I do agree with the general principle here and we are quite lucky that many internet giants are contributing to OSS and adding lots of value that way. And I very much welcome any positive influence WP has on other companies in terms of encouraging everyone to be good citizens and stewards of the web. But I don't view this as an issue about politics or differing viewpoints coming from a company. FB is a corporation with business incentives that are objectively and demonstrably deleterious to the open web as well as its users (and I would argue, society as a whole), it threatens the well WP depends on to thrive. Its influence is far too big and should not be made even bigger. And those business incentives are not subject to influence or mollification from projects like WordPress.

Furthermore, letting FB shape the web even to the point of affecting the code base of perhaps the most special OSS project in the world (WordPress) is not just deflating, to me it is heretical. I know most other developers wouldn't go so far and judge React in a more neutral way, I don't judge that, but that doesn't make it a good fit for a project like WordPress.

As I mentioned in my parent comment, we’d already started reaching out to Facebook before the Apache foundation thing happened

Not withstanding that, Matt's unpublished React announcement post preceded a lot of good discussion that has been happening only after React was rejected and it is generally admitted that any alternative to React that was being discussed before May had the deck stacked in its favour due to many practical reasons. Now we are seeing far more thought going into choosing a way forward, discussions that wouldn't have happened if the hoopla around licensing hadn't unfolded.

In any case, I'm still very pleased that we're now investing more time in the decision and that there is a strong commitment to making the APIs not entirely dependent on the usage of one particular 3rd party framework.