But from the very beginning, Canonical/Ubuntu chose to make mirroring the repo easy, and encouraged the usual network of public mirrors to participate, much as

But from the very beginning, Canonical/Ubuntu chose to make mirroring the repo easy, and encouraged the usual network of public mirrors to participate, much as Debian and other distros had done for years. (It wouldn't be unfair to say that Canonical/Ubuntu had to meet the expectation those distributions had set.) That is something the WordPress community (albeit centralised in the WordPress.org decision makers) could have been doing for decades.