I don't believe that it was purely because Drupal 8 broke compatibility. Many were excited about Drupal 8. Drupal fell behind in some areas. Looking at Wordpr

I don't believe that it was purely because Drupal 8 broke compatibility. Many were excited about Drupal 8. Drupal fell behind in some areas. Looking at Wordpress and Gutenberg (while not perfect) it has leapt forward to provide a modern content editing experience. Perhaps Acquia focused on the wrong things? Perhaps other companies making money on Drupal didn't invest enough to improve it? Drupal.org needs to be a flagship of what Drupal can be. The documentation is not well organised. Page loads are slow. Contributing can be difficult for newcomers. Other open source projects are better at selling themselves through their project website, documentation and code examples. Drupal.org shows its age. Drupal can take a lot of time to setup and theme. Keeping Drupal installations up to date requires expertise. Smaller clients these days realise Drupal might be too expensive and found an alternative CMS or moved to a Saas. Laravel probably also took a big chunk of custom development away from Drupal. At some point I think the community can only do so much. There is nostalgia. Many times I have thought to myself: If only I could give all my time to a project like Drupal. I know, I know.. I could have. I should have... For me, life got busy and my career went in a different direction. I do also think the situation expelling Crell was weird. It felt like bridges got burned and I know people who also felt it was a strange way to handle the situation. Can't we make that right? This is not to criticise anyone. It is just my opinion. I am not a big time Drupaler, so you could see this as an outside perspective.