The modern version of "Nobody got fired for buying IBM" is "nobody got fired by using a brand name the boss recognizes". That is what AEM does that Drupal does not.

The boss doesn't know what content management even is, but they have heard of Photoshop and Acrobat so AEM must be good.

Also, they’re paying millions a year just for the license. Nobody would do that if the product wasn’t best in class right?

Guarantee they ran an RFP process for the CMS. AEM does everything its not intuitive and overly complex. Just like Concur does everything and but everyone hates it yet its defacto expense program at large companies.

Sadly, there’s a lot of truth in that!

Can't you use similar logic to tell your boss that nasa, energy.gov, the beatles, weather.com, tbs and all those other older-people-know-about-this sites all use drupal?

At least it's tolerable at all compared to the shitshow that is AEM.

it's suited mostly for large multinationals. I havent used drupal or wordpress at that scale, but if you have website that you need to rollout to >30 countries in many languages AEM might be for you.

just an example of the kind of companies that use it. apple, intel,etc .e.g https://jobs.apple.com/en-in/details/200207733/aem-engineer