Personal opinion: Even as someone who used and loved PHP for a decade, Drupal is just awful. It's overengineered and bloated and the documentation is pretty sparse, not to mention it's hard to scale up. Its admin and editor UX is decades being modern headless CMSes. It is extremely powerful, but seemingly built to handle the most extreme edge cases rather than the most common use cases, and a lot of the power is just confusing and unnecessary for your typical website. In like 10% of the time it takes to get a Drupal system up and running well, you can do the same thing with Wordpress and Advanced Custom Forms and end up with an infinitely better UX, DX, and EX.

Drupal suffers tremendously from "by engineers, for engineers" and it's just an incredibly poor experience if you don't fit that mold. It's non-stop pain for no reward.

Having used it for a major project (both in daily use and in a big migration from D7 to D8/9), I will NEVER take another job that uses Drupal again... it is the second most dreaded web framework for a reason (above only Angular): https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-most-loved-dre...

Halfway through our Drupal "upgrade" (rewrite, because D7 had no upgrade path), we just gave up on it and went to Next.js + a headless CMS instead. Everyone was massively happier after that... the devs, the editors, IT, marketing, content writers, analytics... Drupal was just soooo bad that even its newest version was years if not decades behind modern experiences.

Sorry I feel so strongly about this... the mere word makes my blood boil. I've never HATED a technology the way I hate Drupal, before or since. If you're considering it for a project for the first time, don't walk, SPRINT as far away as it as you possibly could.