In reply to Peter Knight.

This. Exactly this.

The success of WordPress as it stands today is also based to great factor on PHP and that it was/ is easy to learn and understand for beginners. Like Matt once said: "WordPress brought me into PHP" - hey, the same for me.

With JS and all those JS frameworks and stuffing my machine up with all these useless build tools and the whole kitchen sink is no fun.

It all creates a new entry barrier for WordPress users, "implementors" and developers.