I think this is true, however, when it comes to non-coding clients I've worked with they really do like the ability to make minor edits to a site with a UI rather than having to continually ping a developer.

The problem with WordPress (and it looks like this solution largely just replicated the problem) is that it's way too cumbersome and bloated.

It really is unlike any modern UI for really any SaaS or software in general.

It's filled with meaningless admin notices, the sidebar is 5 miles long and about 98% of what the user sees is meaningless to them.

Creating a very lightweight, minimal UI for the client to edit exactly what they need or like you said, just static files really is the best solution in most cases. The "page builders" always just turn into a nightmare the clients end up handing over for a dev to "fix" anyways.

Not sure why so many people feel the need to continue on the decades of bloat and cruft WordPress has accumulated, even if it's "modernized."

There are two types of WordPress sites from my perspective as someone who got their start in webdev in that ecosystem.

The first and arguably largest is exactly what you describe. Little sites for small businesses who just want an online presence and maybe to facilitate some light duty business development with a small webshop or forum. These sites are done by fly by night marketers who are also hawking SEO optimization and ads on Facebook and they’ll host your site for the low low price of $100/mo while dodging your phone calls when the godaddy $5/mo plan they are actually hosting your site on shits the bed.

The second, and more influential group of WordPress users, are very large organizations who publish a lot of content and need something that is flexible, reasonably scalable and cheap to hire developers for. Universities love WP because they can setup multisite and give every student in every class a website with some basic plugins and then it’s handsoff. Go look at the logo list for WordPress VIP to see what media organizations are powered by WP. Legit newsrooms run on mostly stock WP backends but with their own designers and some custom publishing workflows.

These two market segments are so far apart though that it creates a lot of division and friction from lots of different angles. Do you cater to the small businesses and just accept that they’ll outgrow the platform someday? Or do you build stuff that makes the big publishers happy because the pay for most of the engineering talent working on the open source project more generally? And all that while maintaining backwards compatibility and somewhat trying to keep up with modern-ish practices (they did adopt React after all).

WordPress is weird and in no way a monoculture is what I guess I’m trying to say.

Are you sure the admin notices and sidebar are not plugin issues?

I use Wordpress for my blog because I stopped caring about maintaining one, and I'm mildly confident wp will be around for 10 more years.

There are basically no notices and the admin sidebar is ~10 obvious entries (home, posts, pages, comments, appearance, settings etc).