[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.