I wouldn’t give too much on the speculations and opinions of any one person, even if he’s the Matrix project lead. Probably especially the project lead, because part of his job is being optimistic about changes so they actually happen.

Yep, I think that's a very peculiar aspect of Matrix, about how it's run and why I have such a hard time trusting and recommending it. It's uncommon for opensource projects (especially "essential" ones) that adoption and fame must precede stabilization, as a condition to get to keep the cashflow and the lights on.
I don't think Matrix, starting up on venture capital, with an original but completely unproven idea, downplaying alternatives with FUD and superlative marketing, over-promising and constantly deflecting, was good community building.
Had they kept a lower profile and not an antagonizing one, they could probably have built and integrated better with the other communities in this space (and I'm not just talking about XMPP, which was on the receiving end of the FUD, but also about libera.chat whose OPs are right to be fed-up with NV).

so perhaps you just read too much into his more optimistic posts and comments?

Arathorn, 2023-09-23:

It's also true that 8 years ago, everything was flakey as hell. However, whether you like it or not, we fixed it. The federation problems were resolved before the time of Matrix 1.0 back in 2019, and since then we've focused on making everything go fast too - e.g. Faster Room Joins in Matrix 2.0.

I don't know any admin who considers federation problems to be solved, and I don't think Matrix 2.0 to be ready for the general public, so I call this denial, but heh, this is subjective :)