In reply to Marshall.

Yes it's possible that one of the side-effects of Gutenberg etc could be to improve the business-footing of those offering development services. Efforts, eg, to regrade the learning-curve at Drupal have remained unimpressive, in part because the challenges keep developers busy.

I would not say that that makes it a scam, though. Themes are such a field, too (long-time, in WP). But in all these cases and a rich ecosystem of (modern) homologies, all the Docs you could ask for are honestly provided. If you like sweat-etquity, you're free - and encouraged! - to buckle up a tool-belt and go to it. No, nothing necessarily hinky about this dynamic (which in fact has been prevalent back into the computing Stone Age), and no whiff of nefariousness here, that I'm noticing.

But what I do suspect is, it's partly motivated by an approaching monopoly situation. As WordPress becomes even more successful, it will verge into "prohibitive dominance". The cure for excessive success, is Competition (even if you have to prop 'em up).

To the extent that a towering IT actor needs to 'make room' for & support other actors who provide ... "See; we do too have competitors".

Since the Block system is accorded dummy-ware status by development-insiders (at best self-interest, and more accurately, a frank fallacy) ... and dummy-CMS projects already use it to ease the curve for their target-audience (this & other signs telling us for some while now that WP is no longer the easy-option that gained it fame) ... Blocks at WP should have the myriad of not-officially-dead Blog & CMS projects licking their chops.

Blocks are inherently semantic & parsing-friendly. This means that translation, porting and migration all become clearer & smoother. I predict a surge across the field of (barely) surviving major-CMS projects, and the dozens nay hundreds of tiny projects spanning great variation (which suffers under the Drupal/WordPress 'hegemony').

And I daresay, having watched him since the days when Drupal and phpNuke and the rest of the Boys laughed in his face and brayed like jackasses at WordPress ... that Matt Mullenweg is the kind of person you want leading this process, and that he has steadily learned & can handle the load.