[codingdave]

I've been running Wordpress blogs and helping people with theirs for a long time, and simply never had that much maintenance to deal with. Sure, if you let them go nuts with plugins it will go wonky, so don't. If they install a plugin that breaks everything, uninstall it and help them figure out a better solution.

Wordpress out-of-the-box just works. Stick to the basics, and you'll be fine. And for the use case of OP, that is exactly what they seem to be talking about - a basic portfolio site. If you need more than the basics, that is when you leave Wordpress. It sounds like you might be getting into trouble because you are pushing Wordpress way past its core use case.

[lostinthefield]

I've never seen a Wordpress site meeting only its "bare use case" that wouldn't have been better served by Wordpress.com itself (the hosted managed service) or Squarespace. The clients who've hired me did so explicitly to push Wordpress past its defaults, whether through the use of something like a page editor (WPBakery/Elementor/etc.) or an events plugin or another or some contact form... those are all basic, common usages that still require maintenance.

If their use was basic blogging, I try to steer them away from needing to hire a dev at all (why spend the money?).