I missed this earlier - as always, it’s hard to convey nuance in a HN comment, so of course there are non-technical people who are successful at building Wordpress sites. I’m not a mechanic, but I can fix things on my car, because I’m reasonably handy and can read instructions and compare diagrams and I know when I’m over my head. I think the analogy holds up for Wordpress too - there are non-technical people who can figure it out, and that’s great. But I would argue they are a small population relative to the total addressable market of people who need websites.

Put another way - what data do we have that shows that “everybody from kids to grandmas” started sites on Wordpress? And to get more specific, how many of those users either had help getting it set up, or used a template and made zero changes to it, or had a hosting provider build a site for them using a builder atop Wordpress? Because the data I’ve seen suggests that users really struggle with any customization of a Wordpress site, and I think the adoption of Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy’s website central, etc. shows that there is a real gap there for Wordpress.

The data I have is who I've had as clients for other services throughout the past decade. Clearly a trend in the UK and USA, and almost all of them figure it out on their own from the extensive documentation and YouTube videos available.