[alicorn]

I have worked for several years with WordPress. Everything you say is true if the devs are incompetent. Then yes, the variety of ways one can shoot themselves in the foot and completely dead with the system is astounding. I have seen horrible wp installations galore myself.

However that is not fault of the tool itself. There is nothing preventing a competent dev or small team to set up staging and qa environments, a ci pipeline if they are so inclined, write proper tests, be discriminating in the plugins they install and the quality of code they write. And the start threshold for the system is incredibly low, the fact that so much boilerplate functionality is _already there_ saves a lot on development costs and allows you to focus on functionality that really matters.

TL;DR if your wp installation is bad, it's not wordpress, it's you.