I'm sure the whole Automattic - WPEngine drama isn't exactly news to anyone, but one potential consequence occurred to me.

The post at https://wptavern.com/developers-remove-plugins-from-wordpress-org-repository-after-acf-controversy mentions that a handful of plugin providers are making plans to migrate away from hosting their code on wordpress.org, and at this point it wouldn't be a huge surprise if more did the same. Since WordPress Packagist mirrors that, there's potential for disruption to sites using these plugins.

My question is, how would this be handled in principle? I had a search through the issues to see if it made any mention of how removed plugins are handled, but couldn't find anything. I'd imagine that seeing as this mirrors the Wordpress plugin and theme directories, then any plugins or themes which disappear from those would be marked as abandoned.

Obviously, in an ideal world, for those that are going to be available through an alternative means such as a GitHub repository, they would be published direct to Packagist and WPackagist would mark them as the replacement so switching would be a simple matter of changing the repository name. However, I fully appreciate that that isn't likely to happen given that it's almost certainly going to be a manual task, and some plugins might use other means. I don't imagine the number of plugins affected are likely to be huge, and doing a Google search for the new plugin repository and updating our project's composer.json isn't a big task.