The results will tell. I’m happy to stand by them the past 14 years, and believe the next 14 will validate our approach.

It's possible that a project succeeds in spite of a decision rather than because of it. WordPress has succeeded in its first 14 years without telemetry and will quite possibly continue to succeed in the next 14 years without it.

But success is a spectrum, and I worry that treating it as a binary state prevents us from being even more successful through ideas like telemetry. If we can build a successful product without data, imagine what we could do with it.