I had a different experience from what Matt is talking about - people being confused when I told them "just use WordPress" and instead of going to wordpress.org they went to wordpress.com, not to WP Engine. I don't think Matt is being completely sincere here and just wants to bash the WordPress-as-a-service competition here.

If I want to search locally, I'll use some tool to search my checked-out code.

I used to search my org's code on a daily basis and all of GitHub a few times a week at least, back when I used git for work.

I think you may be overestimating how common your specific use-case is.

The tech behind Bard was announced before ChatGPT, so I doubt this is reactive.

I mean the statement is, not Bard itself.

Nitpick: Google's go/ links don't automatically point to Moma Search if no result is found.