You’ve raised some good points. However, still the most confusing issue is that many people don’t understand the difference between .com and .org. You can’t blame them if they’re looking at something that is branded as “WordPress.com” – who wouldn’t think that it’s WordPress.

If you then look at how different the user experience is on WordPress.com in comparison to a regular self-hosted WordPress site, it’s understandable that people are confused. On WordPress.com the regular WordPress dashboard is even completely hidden. It seems to be the first step to replace it entirely, probably with Gutenberg.