Those aren't just the top plugins, they are also each accompanied by companies providing these plugins as paid products. Yes, Automattic could provide a lot of

Those aren't just the top plugins, they are also each accompanied by companies providing these plugins as paid products. Yes, Automattic could provide a lot of those things out-of-the-box nowadays, and pay for the required development efforts, but that would probably kill the whole commercial plugin ecosystem around Wordpress pretty quickly. So this situation is kind of the extreme flip-side of what happens if you don't step into competition with your ecosystem suppliers, which a lot of other companies are being criticized for. I think Automattic is overall doing it in a quite fair way - Akismet, WooCommerce and Jetpack from the list are plugins/products maintained by Wordpress. What I also wouldn't underestimate is the cargo culting that's happening in the WP plugin ecosystem. As the author noted, there are a few plugins (especially the one for "securing" the WP install) that are usually not needed, and don't actually do anything useful on modern WP installs anymore. But a lot of WP marketers love their list of curated plugins, and will drag them along to new employers/clients far beyond their expiration time.