Yes, I always see people post comments like "why not just use (some crazy stack of CLI tools, markdown, source control, and CDNs) it's way better for XYZ reason" not realizing that the people behind most WP sites--which constitute something like 25% of the internet--are in general extremely nontechnical people who are posting recipes, sharing knitting patterns, writing travel blogs, archiving family photos, etc., and who have ZERO interest in anything that looks like source code.

And I don't blame them! I run wordpress sites and I sigh with frustration any time I have to insert a custom HTML block, and I am technical. When I'm writing on WP I want it simple and easy.

WP is also not just a CMS where you can drop in something else. It's a colossal ecosystem of plugins, themes, and so on. Some sites run on entire mini-ecosystems within the WP ecosystem, e.g. generatepress/generateblocks/generatecloud.

WordPress is to creating website what Excel is to generic business calculations.