I for one am glad that Wordpress doesn't behave like the App Store, yanking apps willy-nilly with no warning, and little recourse.
Wordpress development is for developers, not consumers. They don't require the same level of hand-holding. When things like this occur, devs can make the choice to remove the plugin on sites they maintain.
For prospective users, every plugin page has a "reviews" section that tells them exactly if the plugin does anything shady. Yoast isn't a monopoly and thanks to how the plugin ecosystem has evolved over time, WP devs usually have a second or third option to go with, should their #1 pick no longer meet their needs.
I think a lot of the rip is from Wordpress generally being insecure. You can have it locally and treat it like Jekyll and have your json sent to git and published to something like Netify.
> I think a lot of the rip is from WordPress generally being insecure.
That too - I put adware on my wp-admin pages in the same boat.
I've seen the JSON publishing route and I'm not 100% impressed with how it operates. In most WP situations you want to give people who are non-devs the capability to manage content which local setups like this don't accommodate well.
A lot of people complain how apple app store removes apps that Apple doesn't like. Or how Firefox no longer allows users to provide add-ons that are not through the Firefox store. That and other walled gardens make the the new tech world much less free and much more dependent on tech giants. I personally would prefer WordPress to allow whoever wants to make an app and give the users the responsibility to choose what to add and what not
> I personally would prefer WordPress to allow whoever wants to make an app and give the users the responsibility to choose what to add and what not
I'm totally with you but that assumes that WP devs have the responsibility to make responsible decisions. The range of skill for a typical WP dev is outstanding, where on one end you have people who can't write a for loop adopting the "dev" title, and on the other end you have skilled engineers.
I've seen WAY too many people call themselves "devs" when all they do is try to install plugins to piece together a website. In relation to Apple and FF - average users are not savvy at all and have been shielded from the nuts-and-bolts decisions that we make on a daily basis. Trusting them with the responsibility to make good decisions is precarious.
In many ecosystems this would warrant the plugin getting pulled from the ecosystem but WP just lets it fly.