WordPress.org is just a vector to sell Jetpack and WordPress.com at this point.

In the past decade they could have easily fixed a lot of key pains in WordPress, but on one side there are a bunch of amateurs WP users who just don't care and on the other, if they fix obvious security and performance issues, they can't sell "managed WordPress" that easily.

How hard is it to add a "staticize WordPress" toggle? Log in, WP is dynamic; log out, PHP stuff is rendered unexecutable. If WP had a native "static" mode, plugin authors would have to figure out a way to support it well in most cases.

WP has built in cache (an API for it, which hundreds of caching plugins take advantage of).

Built-in CDN doesn't make any sense for the self-hosted version. But you can install a plethora of third party plugins for CDN, like Jetpack.

Multilingual support I can agree with. There are discussions ongoing about it and I do think it's going to drop some time in 2022, but for now you're relegated to solutions like Polylang. Polylang actually works really well out of the box, but it does not have 100% compatibility with every plugin.

I assume they want you to use JetPack which offers all of that (for free.) I just use WPRocket for caching, it seems to be the best.

There are multiple plugins that do each of those things. There's no need to build it into the core product.

I'm not a big fan of wordpress but am running it anyway for our corporate website (I'm the CTO) because it hits the good enough mark and it is just not worth my time trying to come up with something better.

The big advantage of the current setup: I don't have to micromanage it beyond making sure we have backups and the site stays up and running. Our sales and marketing people manage the content and I don't have to babysit them. Win, win for me because I have more interesting things to do then maintaining a website.

The downside: it's PHP and security vulnerabilities are a constant risk and worry with that. I just checked we are up to date and don't have this caching plugin installed. However, we have a constant stream of opportunistic bot traffic trying to exploit pretty much every vulnerability ever for wordpress, php, and php related tooling that we aren't even running. So, I'm more than a bit paranoid about any hypothetical way in.

This!

Hopefully creating a performance team might help solve some of these issues

https://make.wordpress.org/core/2021/10/12/proposal-for-a-pe...

IIRC Jetpack (from Automattic, which also makes WordPress) offers cache and CDN options but the lack of multilingual support indeed baffles me!

On top of that, the most used multilingual plugin, WPML, while powerful and effective is a UX and UI nightmare...

Automattic, the makers of Wordpress, have a free and very powerful cache plugin.