As devs, if we ignore that and push people towards solutions that are significantly harder in our customers minds to manage, we lose them as customers and the space as a whole suffers.
As a bone of contentions "it's outdated php language" is nothing but personally biased nonsense. I say that as a non php developer with no dog in this fight.
As I understand it (disclaimer: not a WP dev), the thing with WordPress is that they have a goal to never break backwards compatibility. This is good for their users, given that (as you say) most of them aren’t developers. However, it also means they’re stuck with design decisions they made ten or twenty years ago.