Block themes, FSE, and a sane caching story have changed the calculus. How we evaluate WordPress against custom builds today.
A senior engineer joined our team and asked, in their first week, why we were still recommending WordPress for some clients. We sent them three production sites we had built in the past year and asked them to find the parts they could not have built in Next.js as quickly.
They could not. Block themes and full-site editing have closed most of the design gaps. Caching is a sane story now, especially with object cache and a reverse proxy. The plugin landfill we used to inherit is now a curated, minimal set.
WordPress is not the right answer for every project. It still is the right answer for content-heavy sites whose owners want to publish on day one without standing up a stack. The wrong answer is to recommend it because it is what you know.