What constitutes a Wordpress Site? The 3 page hobby site or the 100th of pages of a large company?
There is a reason why Wordpress is (open source!) dominating the space ever since or more precisely, many niches.
To be honest, I had my fair share of "You might not need Wordpress" but in the end, nothing beats its versatility, its rights management and options. There is always a plugin for that.
I see no conntenter. Astro has its merits and use case - so have plenty of others (remember Hugo etc.?).
At a certain time you will hit a threshold or problems that are easy to solve using WP you usually disregard at the beginning.
I usually start out "No, WP isn't needed, just to regret it afterwards." There is a dilemma because customers only start to really utilize their website the moment it is setup. And it always went from "Just 5 pages" to "Can I add a marketplace?" to ballooning content as well as timed postings and social media integration.
I stopped questioning WP, because I really don't see alternatives in certain spaces.
Security is a concern, yes, but nevertheless, let's not talk about NodeJS in this regard.
Wordpress isn't a paradigm, it just works and while it seems to be some 20 years old odd code, quite many of the CMS in the React space struggled hard to getting to terms with the lastest paradigm shifts.
Wordpress is the reliable dude who looks boringly normal, but on the other hand never gets you into trouble.
So paraphrase IBM: No one gets fires for using WordPress.
And I would not say this about any other CMS. They are incredible hard, you have to get a lot of stuff right. But I won't implement my own CMS again. At a certain time everybody will come to this realization, most likely, when you have a deadline and miss out features that are hard to implement.
This is my opinion and I love playing and toying around with CMS ever since, even forums (phpBB?) or DIGG clones like Pligg back then. Great stuff, but I stick to WP.
Wordpress gets you into trouble all the time imo. There are better solutions out there. Every headless cms I’ve used has been much less of a headache compared to Wordpress. I wish I could share your optimism on it, but man, it’s a real pain.
Perhaps what keeps it so dominate in the space is its plugin ecosystem. You can pretty much do anything with it with off the shelf plugins, and a metric fuckton of duct tape. Headless options are way better, but you need to implement stuff yourself. Which of course is a massive barrier in many cases, but when you have the ability to do so, it’s almost always better to do so.