This feels like a response from a seasoned backend engineer. Seasoned frontend developers value user experience and design — thus the tendency to go "back to static" and rarely back to WordPress.
I do agree that if you need plug ins, that appears to get messy very fast, but the default WordPress site does everything I want and requires very little for maintenance.
For example, I like Ghost (https://ghost.org/) for my personal needs.
Worst case I use a dedicated PHP page and MySQL. But in reality I think I usually put my code in functions.php(?) And it works fine.