I think the real issue that I have with Matt's answers is where he says:

“A lot of people were showing up [to dev chats] who had never contributed to WordPress before and were crowding out the discussion of the core team.”

They went behind closed doors to keep from dealing with opinions from people who had never contributed before. That is ridiculous. Sure, the meetings would have been nuts.

But he is specifically calling out those who have never contributed before but are now trying to get involved in his so-called democratizing of publishing. When the people affected by a decision share their voices and then the decision-makers move behind closed doors because they don't want to hear them, that's the polar opposite of democratizing the platform.