If I am being completely honest, I have to say that I agree with that "hit piece" article 100%. I am not a developer, but merely a simple Wordpress user, having to deal with WP on a daily basis. And I absolutely hate it.

Wordpress - to me - is such a massive mess. The editing experience is absolutely horrible, and even third-party tools that try to solve that problem (so-called site builders like Elementor) don't really help and make every site slow and sluggish.

Every simple thing that should be built into a modern website building tool requires a plugin. A lot of the plugins mess everything up. And you need tons of those.

Gutenberg was a step in the right direction, but it has been in extremely slow development for years with almost no real progress from a user's perspective. When was full site editing first announced? Years ago. And it's still not fully here and not nearly as capable as any of the el-cheapo site builders out there.

I am struggling every single day to get the layout of posts and pages show up the same way as they do on the backend, and even on the backend it's a struggle to get simple layouts that are consistent. One has to constantly tweak a bazillion parameters of third party blocks, themes and plugins, and it still doesn't work. It takes more time to maintain and "design" than it takes to actually get your content out.

I will never understand how Wordpress ever got so popular. Some will argue "it's the ecosystem, stupid" and I will respond that this ecosystem only exists because Wordpress itself is so utterly bad that third parties need to enhance it with plugins and block libraries.

So whether that article was a hit piece or not, it was 100% right. Wordpress really needs to rethink itself and take some cues from things like Webflow.