A lot of WordPress enterprise users will be upset after finding out that after paying $20-100k a month, Wordpress actually poaches their employees. Just inspect a Wordpress enterprise site's response to certain endpoints using cURL or Postman, it will actually tell you to apply for Automattic. I have been meaning to write about this for a very long time.
Because they're not paying only for Wordpress-the-software, they're paying for scalability, maintenance, etc. $100k/mo is probably cheaper than a team of high-end WP experts.
Same reason a ton of us pay for AWS/GCloud/Azure instead of dealing with bare metal. (And I say this as someone running an edge fleet. If I didn't need to, I wouldn't.)
News sites can be very large - so running on Wordpress.com infrastructure can cause such amount. With cloud storage (provided by WP), additional support etc.
That doesn't sound like poaching to me? I mean, if it's a public endpoint, the person who finds it could be an independent contractor hired to work on the site, or a random person on the Internet probing the site for fun.
What you describe sounds more like a cleverly hidden ad. Google and others were famous for this during silicon valley's growth phase when you could get a job as a software engineer if you had heard of Java in passing and could fog a mirror.
Intent matters: a hiring campaign doesn't rise to the level of poaching unless there is some concerted effort to attract specific employees and/or talent from a specific company.
Finally, poaching is a perjorative term, but the practice of hiring another company's talent (even if they are a competitor) is not illegal or unethical. Companies SHOULD have to compete against each other for top talent.
Eh I mean this is common default no? If you inspect element on many sites it links to the career page. Reddit, discord, etc.
Maybe a little distasteful since I suppose since these WordPress sites are not owned by WordPress, but I wouldn't really say it's unique or necessarily poaching
