This approximates to a pyramid scheme; or maybe, the US Social Security system is another great correlate. The only way it keeps going after even only ten years is raising prices for new customers subsidizing existing customers.
That’s not going to happen, but such a small percentage of customers would sign up for this it’s effectively a non issue for the viability of the company.
Honestly, I think some regulations requiring some kind of independent trust should be required for any ‘lifetime’ subscriptions. Sorry we uhh renamed the product, your subscription is no longer valid. Sure, then refund my money.
It’s worth exactly as much as it states.
Investing this money now might be beaten by inflation, competition or happenstance. But it could also grow the business and turn into orders of magnitude more value.
I agree however that Wordpress does not have such a long term prospect.
As of now, it’s both falling behind and moving into wrong directions at the same time from a technical perspective:
It’s increasingly more complex and unstable for non-technical users.
It’s bloated, full of gotchas, very hard/finicky to integrate with standard PHP tooling and has comically bad performance. So it deters developers.
It won’t go away anytime soon. But I very much doubt that it will be as relatively popular in even 10y as it is now.