There are multiple related threads. I wanted to highlight that @sam made clear that my characterization here that “the discourse team fundamentally disagree with this” was either wrong or outdated:
I would expect that the reason that CDCK aren’t applying their resources to doing this work is that few if any of their paying customers care about this, or at least prioritize it over other feature work. I suspect that there’s a lot more community interest than corporate interest in this work at this time and for the foreseeable future. If CDCK take on this work, the opportunity costs in not building other features that their customers are asking for could be significant. (I have no insider knowledge here.)
Given Sam’s comment linked to above, if a group of Discourse community developers care enough to build a plugin, I would expect CDCK to invest in cooperation with those developers to review and merge any core changes required to make that plugin effective. My experience with the small contributions I have made to Discourse is that they have prioritized effort to review and help with work that they would not have prioritized doing themselves. 