"Can you put our holidays on the main page?", "Can you adapt this text?", "We have a new image of our main shop, can you update it?", ...
I've seen plenty of people building a website for someone and thinking they made good money, but after all the requests that come afterwards, it's not worth the time.
These consultancies strike the right balance in terms of knowing their product, managing expectations, and knowing when to say "no".
It's created lots of jobs in South Africa for what that's worth. Can't speak for other countries.
WooCommerce began as a plugin by a wordpress theme company in South Africa (WooThemes). And then they were aquired by WP/Automattic in ~2015. A really cool case of pivoting.
imho the best part of WP is the dashboard stuff, so headless WP is a good choice. It's also frequently hurt by PHP's heavy push on inheritance, which can be at-odds with what is actually a very good events-based architecture in WP. Sad part is that the very good events-based architecture is so overlooked, most people who have spent time developing in WP aren't even aware it has events.
The problem I see is that, in many instances, WP is pushed by dodgy developers running a template for what is a static site. This is easily the case for 90%+ of the small business sites I see. Many are never changed.
WordPress is a much larger attack surface than static hosting. There are fairly obvious ways of automating using WordPress to generate a static site that will be faster and more secure. I believe this is generally referred to as headless WordPress. Why does this not happen more – or do I just not see it when it does?