In reply to Chuck.

I guess if you want to really pivot and abandon your base for a new direction, that's the way to do it.

That’s the thing, WP is dead set against moving forward on PHP scale. So JS became for WP an idea of future bail out out of legace issues. Because if WP said "we are moving on towards modern PHP" then devs would say "ok, let's start" and later "so were is the progress?".

But saying "we are moving towards modern JS" (itself a much more moving and volatile target) can be said indefinitely, without actually doing it. Realistically WP will never abandon legacy PHP core, will never require node.js on server, and will never deprecate PHP themes.

JS narrative became WP's convenient way of talking about being modern without being modern.