The first time I peeked at wp code I was flabbergasted at how cavalier they were with piles of inefficient queries.

At the time I was tasked with evaluating it as a "cheaper" replacement for an expensive, managed CMS. My conclusion was it would end up being more expensive to accommodate all of this inefficiency with caching galore not to mention support and dealing with a loss of dynamic web sites.

I looked again last year, assuming it had greatly improved, had replaced all that with GRPC or graphql and nope, still horrendously designed.

I wonder if it's intentional or just a case of support for backwards compatibly.