I think the actual meaning being lost in translation here is "self-managing things is awful"—which it is, if you are a dev and don't want to be burdened with ops.
Indeed. First thing that blew my mind is that it checks to see if its files are owned by the uid of the php process. Why? Why can't we just +w on uploads, themes, plugins etc using group permissions?
This is why I'm ditching it and going back to static HTML for my corporate site. As a small consulting shop, we just don't have the time or resources to worry about "WTF is wrong now?"
Static site generators are definitely making a comeback... With the number of vulnerabilities and automated attacks on older versions of WP, and other frameworks, it's not an entirely bad idea...
Generate the site, push to S3 or Azure, then put CloudFlare (or another CDN/Cache) in front of it... Easy peasy.
Same as literally every other application?