I haven't regularly done client WP work in several years but I'm planning on doing some over the next year and I'm curious - how good is Gutenberg now? Before it would be adding fields to the admin with a plugin like Advanced Custom Fields - were they able to make it truly WYSIWYG for editing content?
WordPress core team is still working on the "full site editing" project (that is, being able to edit headers, footers and sidebars in Gutenberg). It's coming probably later this year or beginning of 2021. But you can still edit a lot of things with Gutenberg as-is.
I want to get our team using it for simpler projects, and I haven't really hit any blockers with Gridsome, whereas I've hit plenty with Wordpress when we need a specific url structure.
But even for me, who doesn't need a backend GUI stuff like a contact form was a pain. Luckily I host with Netlify and they have an easy form solution but imagine that across many other situations even for a somewhat simple site. Now you're having to set up accounts with all these other services when before it was all contained in one place. All for what? The benefit doesn't seem substantial enough to me to give all of that up.
Even if you use WordPress as the backend, you've still got to deal with integrating it's API which is more work than something generating all the markup you need etc...
Honestly...what other stack could get you that far in 3-4 HOURS?
For clients though? If they want WordPress (or give a feature list that sounds up WordPress' alley without needing a bespoke Laravel build) they get it. We'd lose all our customers if I tried to get them editing Hugo markdown files!
Netlify could do with watching their PR at this point I feel. The honeymoon period is over. I've personally switched my site to a fiver DigitalOcean box and Cloudflare because I already had the DO box for another project. The deploy is infinitely faster and I don't need to worry about hitting limits bumping me up to a 50 quid a month account
As a former user who had one of those typical personal Wordpress blogs on a shared hosting setup, I experienced the nightmare of dealing with spam, hacking, having to constantly upgrade, etc. So for my own use I would never consider anything other than a static site generator; but I can see the appeal for many use cases, especially if the backend is managed (services like WP Engine) or semi-managed (the guy who set it up is getting a small monthly fee to keep an eye on things).
My sense is that WP Engine targets busy professionals who have first-hand experience of how much hassle a WP installation can be to maintain, people for whom downtime or being hacked has potentially a severe cost in terms of lost business, reputational damage, etc. The other way to look at it is that $300/mo sounds like a lot for "just a WP installation", but it's peanuts compared to hiring another person for your IT department.
You're also paying for decent support tech's and support availability. I think to this day you can call and a human will pick up the phone. Tech's are well versed in the WordPress ecosystem and many are developers who can help you troubleshoot things at the code level, whereas with some budget webhost, they'll tell you to pound sand and hang up (albeit more politely).
That said, I think these "premium" WordPress hosts are purely for non-devs or devs with no time to provide their own support. If you're a developer, there is no reason to pay that premium to keep your blog online. If you want a more managed solution, use something like ServerPilot or SpinUp WP, or any number of other service that will provide a thin maintenance layer on top of any garden variety VPS provider.
The API will have an official plugin, or someone will have written one because their client needed it and the dev decided to support and sell it. Complicated forms can be turned out with plugins like Gravity forms.
This is why lots and lots of sites are still built on wordpress because the ecosystem around it lets people do a lot of stuff quickly without touching a line of code.
Very simple and more then did the job. It costed basically nothing to use and pretty much anyone could maintain the site.
Wordpress is not going away. As long as you don't have to code to use Wordpress, it will be easier and far more accessible for people that don't have a lot of money for a website to hire a web designer (lower skill, lower pay than developer).
Gatsby or another Jamstack client could build themes that don't require coding, similar to Wordpress, but I don't see it happening. Webflow is sort of doing that now by allowing designers to build websites without coding.
Ultimately, the debate is silly because Wordpress and Jamstack have two different use cases. Wordpress will probably become less popular for big companies, but it will still be very popular for your average small to mid-sized business.