It's not a well informed article. Sure WordPress install growth has flattened. The revenue of both Automattic and WP Engine has not, in fact they've both been on an absolute tear. There's a fair bit of buzz around WebFlow but it's only around 1% of the market. WordPress has a long, long way to fall.
WP started out as blogging software and expanded the mission to include pretty much anyone whose main focus is publishing content on their own website. It's still pretty good at the things that matter, namely that doing the above is still very easy for a totally non-technical user, and the plugin ecosystem is absolutely massive and adds almost any kind of functionality you can think of (if your experience that there is never a plugin that will do what you need, you're definitely atypical).
Mullenweg's antics have been ridiculous - but outside of the WP community itself I don't think they've having a huge impact. Like the people whose businesses depend on a website that a developer set up on WordPress for them - 99% either heard of this issue in passing (maybe because their plugins wouldn't update for a few days) and have now forgotten about it, or they didn't even become aware of it in the first place.
Developers constantly underestimate or misunderstand what this space (publishing content) requires. I don't know why so many of them think you can replace a CMS with a bunch of static HTML files - Dunning-Kruger I guess. The plugin ecosystem is an absolutely massive moat. It's large enough that you would need to spend a billion dollars building an equivalent. Yeah WP has its problems but the most likely competitor to spring up is probably a fork of WP that can stay plugin-compatible at least for a while. The other big open source CMSes that shriveled away did so largely because they could never match the breadth of functionality that plugins made available to nontechnical users. NASA, the White House, Rolling Stone magazine the New York Post, and basically the entire News Corp empire all run WordPress just to name a few off the top of my head. Maybe its days are numbered but more likely it is big enough to be like say IBM and live on in some massive form or another forever. It never needed to be cool in Silicon Valley to exist.
What was telling to me is that even new media websites are using other CMSs or building something of their own these days. WordPress was almost synonymous with the online news media for a time. This is exactly the area where you need multiple authors, taxonomy, and other things you mentioned.
WordPress itself pushed heavily into ecommerce, because it was a more promising area. But at the end of the day, the fact both Automattic and WP Engine earn enough money from enterprise orgs doesn't mean the tech situation here is too different from IBM. Yes, it's big. Yes, lots of people use it. Will it define anything in the future of the web? Not really.
WP started out as blogging software and expanded the mission to include pretty much anyone whose main focus is publishing content on their own website. It's still pretty good at the things that matter, namely that doing the above is still very easy for a totally non-technical user, and the plugin ecosystem is absolutely massive and adds almost any kind of functionality you can think of (if your experience that there is never a plugin that will do what you need, you're definitely atypical).
Mullenweg's antics have been ridiculous - but outside of the WP community itself I don't think they've having a huge impact. Like the people whose businesses depend on a website that a developer set up on WordPress for them - 99% either heard of this issue in passing (maybe because their plugins wouldn't update for a few days) and have now forgotten about it, or they didn't even become aware of it in the first place.
Developers constantly underestimate or misunderstand what this space (publishing content) requires. I don't know why so many of them think you can replace a CMS with a bunch of static HTML files - Dunning-Kruger I guess. The plugin ecosystem is an absolutely massive moat. It's large enough that you would need to spend a billion dollars building an equivalent. Yeah WP has its problems but the most likely competitor to spring up is probably a fork of WP that can stay plugin-compatible at least for a while. The other big open source CMSes that shriveled away did so largely because they could never match the breadth of functionality that plugins made available to nontechnical users. NASA, the White House, Rolling Stone magazine the New York Post, and basically the entire News Corp empire all run WordPress just to name a few off the top of my head. Maybe its days are numbered but more likely it is big enough to be like say IBM and live on in some massive form or another forever. It never needed to be cool in Silicon Valley to exist.