The approach of WP Tavern to this issue seems to me curious, and unlikely to persuade more people to adopt WordPress. To my mind, when someone tells you why they didn’t like your project, that’s valuable feedback.
Of course, they could be wrong or have made mistakes, but will the official news outlet writing multiple stories in which a major theme is “they did it wrong, they’re wrong” do much to change that? It seems to me it could also back-fire. People might begin to suspect that if you get too near WordPress and find there’s something you don’t like, you’d better beware. You might find that news stories about you start being fed into the dashboards of millions of websites. Best just to stay away completely!