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.
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.