Justin, I love your continued coverage on Gutenberg's evolution. It's quite incredible how quickly the experience is evolving.

I've frequently wondered why it's so hard for us as a community to extrapolate Gutenberg’s trajectory and imagine how it’ll change WordPress, but the COIV-19 outbreak has given me some insight.

If you've been around WordPress for any length of time, you have your go-to theme, plugins and page builder. And it’s likely that your toolbox has probably been consistent for quite a long time. Why? Because WordPress moves pretty slowly and not much changes. We haven't evolved to think about WordPress as a fast changing, innovative system. But now, the assumptions that our workflows are predicated on are changing more quickly and more dramatically than they ever have before.

This is just like humans. We didn't evolve to understand things like exponential growth because nothing our ancestors encountered grew exponentially. In fact, for most of human history nothing changed at all--you could live your whole life with nothing new discovered or invented. This is how our life has been for our ancestors for most of humankinds ~200,000 year history up until the last thousand years or so.

Fast growth, and especially exponential growth, are hard for the human brain tom imagine. For instance, a common example: If a species of lily pad reproduces every day, how many days before the pond is covered with lily pads was half the pond covered? The day before. And a few days before that the lily pads would probably go largely unnoticed.

That's why COVID-19 caught so many by surprise. And though the Gutenberg improvement isn't quite exponential, that's why so many are consistently surprised (and will continue to be) by the rate of improvement of Gutenberg.

This is especially true once we grok that Gutenberg is so much more than an editor. For example, I just saw this post today: https://www.codeinwp.com/blog/plugin-options-page-gutenberg/ In it they talk about making plugin options pages with Gutenberg components.

The farther along it gets, the less sense it makes to use anything but Gutenberg for more and more. The efficiency and performance from consolidating foundational components is hard to beat. It's really not a question of "if" Gutenberg will replace X, but when.