This is a reasonable position and with the utility sites I build for, say, bands I play with I totally agree. I toss some shit on commodity hosting and hope the band breaks up before the gcal integration breaks.

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However.

I will now take this opportunity to vent a bit, though it has little to do with your imminently reasonable post. Mostly because I am procrastinating on porting a 3rd-party SSO system from a very old and shitty WP site to a new and shitty WP site and it's hurting my brain to decide how much of the mess of jQuery and bootstrap I really need to keep.

So hopefully this will be understood as venting and not a personal attack against your reasonable observation.

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Consider that there are those of us who have to fix the first group's problems and make things keep working so they don't have to care how the sausage is made.

That is to say, there is a very real third group of folks: those of us who support the first group.

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I've been doing that work for about 14 years for all kinds of folks. I host 300 or so WP sites for a mid-sized university, I built and maintain a .gov site for a three-letter-agency, and I've built plenty of react-based blocks (across 3 majorly different patterns because the GB team doesn't give a fuck about anything, as far as I can tell).

I've worked on every element of WP from deploying servers to fixing CSS so it works in IE6, to scraping non-availible CMSs so that I can migrate thousands of pages and tens of thousands of images to WP. I've written plenty of WPCLI commands to do dumb tasks, I've written plenty of shit-tier code to make, say, calendar events propagate across the bad-for-most-purposes multisite functionality.

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Someone has to know how the sausage is made. I do.

And I know the difference between the teetering pile of steaming crap that is WP.

I've worked on actually useful codebases in my life with tooling that is easy and databases that are grokkable. I am aware that other platforms have issues, and have encountered them in my work.

However, WP is really bad.

And I have no problem bitching about it- I'm burnt the hell out and am about ready just quit and live in my truck and play music.

It's a shitty platform, and people do not pay well to keep it working.

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So anyhow, yeah, you've got a fair point, but there those of us who, because of circumstance, keep heading back into the burning building that is WP and our collective hatred of the platform is well-founded.

I'm happy to pitch in and help migrate those university sites, we can get them on a WordPress stack that's much more stable and forward-compatible.

Going to go out on a limb here and say that a sales pitch doesn't address parent's comment...but it does seem to be implicitly acknowledge that Wordpress is too cumbersome to maintain and even host yourself.

As appealing as it is to think that if we just have more rigorous processes and infrastructure a crappy system will become more stable, it misses the point I was making.

We do have our sites on functional WP stacks. With enough caching, it's not super hard to make things work (until you hit some edge case with a custom theme/plugin that didn't anticipate a supposedly non-breaking change in the core).

Unfortunately, figuring out why the calendar plugin suddenly isn't producing a functional ical output for windows PCs or figuring out why the s3 offloading plugin has started timing out intermittently becomes a large time investment.

So it's kind of fun to suggest that the people who have the pleasure of servicing WP at a high level are just holding it wrong, but the reality is that there are a lot of talented and experienced people out here working on a platform that fundamentally sucks to work on.

It's not logically inconsistent that, on one hand, people chose it because it's an easy-to-implement solution whose benefit massively outweighs its TCO and, on the other hand, when it break or requires extension it's a pain in the ass for those of us charged with doing that work.

I think the divide is more between the new generation of full-stack JS developers and those that cut their teeth on PHP + MySQL.

WP is fantastic for the first group you mentioned. I put it up there with Excel, Filemaker, Visual Basic and similar software that democratize software and make it accessible to everyone.

Naturally all of these things have limits and quality issues that some percentage of users eventually face. That is in of itself fine.

The problem arises when it is expected of a professional to integrate or build on top of these.

People come to web developers with quality expectations, unique problems and requirements. But the legacy that is WP puts so many stumbling blocks and gotchas in the way of these goals that it's not worth it to put a square peg into a round hole.

(Similar can be said about common CRM and ecommerce platforms and solutions.)

> meanders off to work on their own perfectly formatted, ultra-scalable code

Or stops working on their current, imperfect codebase to start a new project that will be perfect… that’ll show ‘em.

I'm a serious software engineer (I think...) but I use WP for my corporate web sites.

> ugly codebase

Ugly codebase is often popular choice - ie. Tailwind CSS.