No, it’s not that easy. Matt Mullenweg personally owns the plugin repository and has weaponized it by literally stealing paid plugins from their developers as revenge. You’d have to create an alternative repository for your fork to actually have a healthy ecosystem, but the individual developers are financially disincentivized to follow due to Mullenweg. This makes for a very uncertain future for both the project and the ecosystem - and why risk it, when there are better options?

Might be, you still shouldn’t build new stuff on there. It’s under the control of a person going through a mental breakdown and lashing out at everyone instead of getting help.

No longer after the drama of the last few months. Stay as far away from WordPress as is humanly possible.

They couldn’t log in because of the WP Engine checkbox