I'll keep saying this until the cows come home, WoG is lame. Worst case scenario those elements may become shallow and situational plot points to justify removing characters from the narrative to add artificial stakes, E.g; a powerful new villain turns up that ONLY Sonic can defeat (due to plot) yet conveniently Shadow is MIA, Blaze has an emergency back in her dimension, Silver gets taken by a "random" time portal, Knuckles is "busy" protecting the Master Emerald on Angel Island, Amy has been kidnapped for the umpteenth time, etc.
I get trying to make a world orderly and concise but if it comes at the cost of pointless retcons, drastically limited world building, appeal to reality and causing more inconsistencies while overruling the work and writing of others then it just comes across as being selfish and kinda egotistical tbh (hmmm... remind you of someone?).
I honestly don't care how powerful the Sonicverse is but I highly doubt Sega will allow years of long established lore, world building and characterization to be dunked on (again) after the last massive fan backlash and the clear drop in game sales as a result compared to Sonic's peaks in the 90s and early 00s.
I dunno if this a "hot take" but I overall prefer Paramounts take on the Sonic franchise (lorewise) over both IDW (minus a couple of arcs) and Prime.
I don't think WoG has a lot to do with this. Except for the times, Ian is clearly doing some trolling for power scaling or similar, most of what he says that matters for this kind of discussion is about the internal discussions of the series. Like the whole Two Worlds stuff, he wasn't making that up, if anything, it was a look into the backstage for stuff they hadn't planned to show yet, but it was already showing its signs (According to Ian, Sonic X was already about introducing the concept and Sonic Forces designer stated making use of that concept making the background). If anything, the WoG on that element that soon helped fans to learn about it and backlash against that lore change before it was too late.
The same goes with other WoG statements that are merely "we are doing X, the Y you saw in Z was a foreshadowing of that change to test the waters) more helped fans to stop the changes before it was too late.
The changes Ian mentioned are already affecting the story. Just a few issues ago Silver said he couldn't just travel on his own (Even though the Sonic Channel profile just said he used chaos control to do that), and Blaze said she couldn't just teleport at will and just would go in and out of her and Sonic's world without much freedom. So what he is saying isn't just WoG, the changes are already on their way and if what Ian said about FFF profiles being a tease to their other plans, it's just getting worse.
The problem really never was WoG on its own (Especially due to how blurry the line between what is and isn't the work itself is nowadays), it's with the staff as a whole, going from those who make the script to the planners and the head office that puts the rulings of what can and what can't.
What I do see is that a lot of the buildup from past materials is now getting erased because "people never knew about that" or "it needs to be simpler", and I really can see part of this being just the staff not knowing how to manage the world of Sonic as it always was, so instead of getting the staff to learn about it and make a comprehensive understanding of the series, we get a staff that is trying to remove elements of the series they don't think are important, even though they are either charming elements that make the world feel more fantastical, or literally very important to the very meaning of Sonic itself.
If anything, the fact that the current staff never addressed the origin story of Sonic made by Oshima and the early notes of the character just shows that there's a very foundational problem here. Sonic and its world are supposed to be over-the-top and have this magical feeling with a character that is basically freedom itself. The whole "two-worlds" stuff was most likely a misunderstanding of the origin story that did state there was a human world and a magical world, if more of the staff read their own stuff (It was literally printed on Sonic Jam's guidebook), maybe they would have gotten what it was. In fact, one of the reasons why I enjoyed Kishimoto's Japanese script was because he really seemed to understand that aspect of Sonic and made it the very foundation of his version of the story.
