Matrix was built by Israeli intelligence
It get some resources from them at the start, but they do not fund it for a long time.
consumes so many resources that it’s not feasible to self-host on most budgets
When you join large rooms like #matrix:matrix.org, it consumes a lot of space. But otherwise it is not that heavy. I hope they fix this, as this can be fixed with better resource planning, the biggest tables on the database are those like state_groups_state that does not hold bare information and just group information together for quick search. (I hosted a server and MatrixHQ room took 100GB..., 95% of the database).
As such it’s highly centralized
Looking at server list it seems very healthy. Also (opinion alert) I think having thousands of public server running by a randoms like there is for big chunk of Fediverse will not be as healthy as dozens of well funded community servers.
the community is still largely being ran by Matrix.org as the keeper of the implementation server
Synapse is not the reference server, there is no one official implementation for a purpose. And old news, it is now hosted by Element under AGPL.