However, this reasoning feels wrong:
If we were to ignore these market forces, Drupal would be caught flat-footed and quickly become irrelevant.
Wordpress is still the same big ball of mud it was 10 years ago and it powers 1/4 of the internet.
Where WP falls short is in the enterprise market, and this is where Drupal's ideal customer is. Drupal powers Tesla, Whitehouse.gov, Weather.com, Economist, NY.gov, and other major sites. So for Drupal to remain relevant to these types of clients it has had to play catchup. D7 changed a lot from it's initial release, and a lot of contrib modules helped make it a decent enterprise-level solution. But D8 is a whole new beast that really sets the bar pretty high. You can literally build anything in Drupal, and with it's new focus on having "headless" RESTful services, it can be used to power your entire content strategy (pushing content to apps, other sites, etc).
I would argue that this is faster than most Wordpress setups:
drush dl drupal
drush si drupal ...
drush en "name of theme"
WordPress's out-of-the-box post install experience is a lot nicer and a lot closer to being a "finished" and ready site.
There are solutions catering to SAAS/application-specific hosting for both. Wordpress.com / Drupal Gardens as well as containers and configurations scripts you can use to get a jump start.
Both have similar philosophies in the sense you can login and immediately start switching on modules/extensions you want to use. Both are CMS.
wp-cli is extremely brittle even for very simple download+install, produces very poor defaults in terms of file/directory permissions and general on-filesystem stuff, and this is before you get into things like drush's many other functions for general admin or its extensibility.
That is not a criticism of wp-cli's developers though, as about 99.9% of its limitations are down to the Wordpress core team's complete disinterest in accommodating its functionality well or in providing a codebase that fits into a modern deployment setup in any reliable, well-considered way.
The work done on wp-cli is really commendable: it seems to be battling against quite a tide.
This is mainly because a front end developer can vomit into a PHP file and Wordpress will gladly display it.
This made me laugh, but it's, alas, very true. In WP's ecosystem, the code you find in plugins, themes and WP itself will just makes your eyes bleed.
but honestly that is what many clients want, make it look pretty and don't bore me with your "best practice" and "you need to apply 12months worth of critical security patch's" mumbo jumbo.