Earlier quoted context omitted.
He is surely very evidently mentally ill. This is a man who, to be fair to him, has been beneficially bullish and iconoclastic in the WP community's favour for decades, as well as writing a big chunk of what was "early modern" WP. Before he came unglued. The fact that he looked, sounded, talked the way he did, was involved, put his own money where his mouth is, and was press-available to the extent he was is a lot of…
I’ve upvoted your comments in this thread because what you’re saying seems obvious to me. You’re also being empathetic and respectful to the man while crediting his legacy and all the work he has done in his past. I wonder if the people objecting to your statement would object as strenuously had you had phrased it as “evidently mentally unwell”. The word “ill” seems to have triggered people into reading more into it…
This is a reasonable hair to split, I agree with you and I think it might have gone differently (though "mentally" itself will trigger people, and there is a lot of certainty that he must be a particular arsehole simply because of the history of WordPress, or Gutenberg, or whatever it was that coloured their judgement).