[tommica]

There are definitely a lot of people who do not like WordPress anymore, there are people who complain about the same things as you do. There just is no other tool that fills the same niche that WP does, semi-easy to use for people without any technical know-how, to add new pages and content.

To me WordPress is a relic of a time long gone, of internet that does not exist anymore, and sometimes wish I could get back to - it enabled so many people to just put out things that they wanted, without having to learn HTML

[rchaud]

There's plenty you can do with WordPress as a developer. There are also no-code tools like Pinegrow that attach dynamic WP functions to static HTML templates.

Automattic's failure IMO is making Wordpress.com feel like a blog platform for far too long. A lot of what users would consider reasonable functionality for a website was not provided in WP core but by the plugin ecosystem. So people just defaulted to plugins for everything, which eventually gave WP a bad name, because plugins were often janky and poorly supported.

[fiddlerwoaroof]

I suspect you’re no longer in the circles that WordPress is targeting: it’s still a fairly common “no-/low-code” platform for people who just want to put together a site for themselves. I think that what’s going on is that programmers generally don’t encounter it as much in “real programming jobs” because it has been so successful in making programmers unnecessary for a whole swath of websites.