alt Hacker NewsIn their defence WMF have been an Element customer for years, for internal usage. But rolling out Matrix across a large community requires significant community management effort (e.g. what Mozilla did with https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/synchronous-messaging-at-moz...), and that's probably the gap you're alluding to here.
To be fair they never did make any effort to provide community chat spaces. Maybe they think it will legitimise not using wiki talk pages to post memes and go off topic, but 20 years of evidence says people will find their own places to hang out. Time was, everyone kind of just happily used Frenode IRC by default (after all, what else was there? MSN?). Now it's all sorts of apps all over the place, mostly set by whoever got fed up with whichever IRC channel first starting their own channel with blackjack and hookers...uh...image attachments and emojis...in their current favourite app. The Freenode/Libera debacle dented what was left, and now it's a pretty sad closed, Balkanized state of things.
I still think they'd get more value out of slinging you guys a small-to-them wodge of cash to run a community homeserver than most other things they spend money on.