I think a distinction needs to be made here. Core contributors do listen but there is a big difference between listening and acting. The core team is predominantly made up of Automattic employees and so it's no surprise that whatever Matt & Co wants goes.

I mean, thousands, and I mean thousands called for Gutenberg to be scrapped and that still got shipped. People called for WordPress to have actual leadership in place that wasn't just Matt. Josepha came along. An Automattic employee.

There's so many more things too. I mean I get it. If I co-founded WordPress I'd want to stay close to the leadership team and drive it forward. What gets a lot of people upset (myself included) is that Automattic is a business that has a financial burden to it. So it needs to do things that make financial sense and sometimes that goes against what individuals want.

We'll never get to a point where people are generally happy with where WordPress is headed unless the open source WordPress project becomes free from commercial interests.