I ran a team at a weekend hackathon event for non-profits. We needed to finish building their new site on the latest version of Drupal. I had SEVEN devs working on a 5 page brochure site with a page to manage events and we couldn't get it done! I felt terrible leaving it incomplete at the event, but honestly, with Drupal as the tech stack—my hands were tied. Luckily the developer who started the work was able to finish it a few months later.
To do it all over again, I would have convinced them to throw away what they had and use a different platform. If we used any other tech stack, we could have finished and launched the site during the event.
That was the first, and last time I touched Drupal.
Honestly, I hate to say this, but if you really want that level of server-side all in one power... maybe Drupal IS worth considering after all. Most modern sites aren't built that way anymore, instead opting to compose a site out of many services (eg a CMS for marketing pages, Discourse for a forum, an auth provider linking them all together, etc.)
A monolithic community on a single engine is in fact the kind of (rare) use case that Drupal actually fits... making its complexity possibly worthwhile. It's just overkill for most sites that aren't like that.
WordPress might also be able to get there eventually, with a lot of plug-ins, but at that point it would be so bloated that Drupal might actually be cleaner. Might also be worth checking to see if any of the older PHP CMSes (Joomla, etc.) are still being maintained.
Sorry, I haven't looked at this sort of use in years and wouldn't be able to provide more details than that :/
Drupal suffers tremendously from "by engineers, for engineers" and it's just an incredibly poor experience if you don't fit that mold. It's non-stop pain for no reward.
Having used it for a major project (both in daily use and in a big migration from D7 to D8/9), I will NEVER take another job that uses Drupal again... it is the second most dreaded web framework for a reason (above only Angular): https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-most-loved-dre...
Halfway through our Drupal "upgrade" (rewrite, because D7 had no upgrade path), we just gave up on it and went to Next.js + a headless CMS instead. Everyone was massively happier after that... the devs, the editors, IT, marketing, content writers, analytics... Drupal was just soooo bad that even its newest version was years if not decades behind modern experiences.
Sorry I feel so strongly about this... the mere word makes my blood boil. I've never HATED a technology the way I hate Drupal, before or since. If you're considering it for a project for the first time, don't walk, SPRINT as far away as it as you possibly could.