The ease and low cost of multi-tenant PHP environments combined with the incredibly massive resource base of themes and plugins basically makes it unstoppable for anyone needing something more than what Squarespace can offer in a budget web platform.
The fact that it can be shoe horned into doing so much at an "acceptable" level of quality makes it a nearly unkillable zombie.
Not quite. In the very distant past Movable Type was the incumbent and WordPress was the scrappy upstart trying to displace it.
Free PHP web hosting was easier to find.
I know there has to be a better way using modern tech.
I’m working on formulating your second requirement now. Some higher level features will certainly require a backend of some sort, but my original hypothesize was to eliminate a backend server and database if I can.
Some of my biggest challenges with Wordpress in the past were staying on top of updates and making sure my plugins didn’t get hacked.
I’m thinking I’m going to offer a simple and cheap hosted version soon that non tech people can login to and administrate all their content.