I was following along when they initially announced it and while I personally think its an awful idea, it did seem to stem not from a profit motive but an intention to make Wikipedia easier to use and more effective, and when the vast majority of contributors and editors responded to tell Wikipedia that it was an atrocious idea and that they shouldn’t do it they listened and scrapped the plan.

My point being, isn’t it better as a whole that they’re willing to consider new things but will also listen to the feedback they get from their users and maintainers and choose not to implement ideas that are wildly unpopular?

Writing off all of Wikipedia (the most effective tool for collaborative knowledge collection in human history) just because they announced a well intentioned tool addition and then scrapped the plan when they realized it was unpopular and would likely degrade their platform seems short sighted at best imo.