The question I've always had is: why hasn't anyone developed something with all the good things of Wordpress, but none of the bad ones. The good things mainly being:
- extensibility and flexibility.
- smooth learning curve at the beggining (when developing custom themes from scratch, compared to, for example, a "real" backend framework).
I’m sure dozens of excellent replacements have been created, but WP is just so huge.
It doesn’t matter how messy it is, you’re not going to convince the marketing agency with 10 Wordpress devs to learn something else.
It’s probably also relevant that WP is so weird and different from other frameworks. A lot of people who make websites with WP don’t seem to know the first thing about web dev outside of the WP ecosystem. I’m not hating on them, but you can use WP in ways that don’t give you skills to use other tech.
Yeah, you can get a WP site up and running with all the functionality you need to support different types of businesses and business ideas cheap on fiverr. Validate and move on.
Keep in mind that WordPress is over 20 years old at this point - the problem it was built to solve just isn't the same anymore.
Most of the use cases nowadays are covered by even easier products (social media, Medium, Linktree, Wix, Squarespace, Shopify, Webflowly, ...)
So you'd consider WordPress for anything that requires something more advanced like login, storing user data, complex state, fully custom design, ... (or out of habit/experience of course). That seems to be within the possibilities for low-code/no-code tools - they aren't quite there yet in my opinion, but in a couple years they might be.
The extensibility, flexibility, and smooth learning curve for non-techies comes at a significant cost.
WordPress was designed to be extensible and flexible without requiring the user to edit source files or run commands in a shell. After all, both of these tasks are serious hurdles for non-techies just starting a blog. The user gets a cheap hosting account with a domain and WordPress pre-installed, and doesn't want to care about what's happening on the server side.
This precludes the use of composer, npm, or any other command-line tool in vogue, for installing and managing plugins, themes, and associated libraries. Plugin and theme developers, of course, can use a package manager to bring in their own libraries if they want. But this is not centrally managed by WordPress, so you often end up with incompatible versions and duplicate functionality.
This is also the reason why no program whose tutorial starts by running a shell command -- git, brew, composer, you name it -- is ever going to replace WordPress.
- extensibility and flexibility.
- smooth learning curve at the beggining (when developing custom themes from scratch, compared to, for example, a "real" backend framework).