I worry about the criticisms I see about Payload not marketing to marketers and site builders, because as a dev I’m a huge fan and would love to see it thrive.
It’s a fair point, especially given that in so many cases the marketers are the ones procuring the CMS. And people who don’t code at all are a big portion of WP’s market.
My main concern is I’m not sure it’s easy for non-devs to see how much of the PHPish ecosystems are filling gaps in the CMS core. I don’t know how many previous CMSes the Payload folks had used before going about building it, but I’ve built tons of features and templates on most of the big ones, and IMO they did a phenomenal job of boiling it down to exactly what a developer needs to build any feature any customer or employer could ever want.
There’s no need for, say, a heavy SEO plugin. You can just define the fields you want your people to fill out and attach those fields to whatever content types you’d like. Then use those fields in the head when presenting the content out front in whatever frontend you want to use.
On top of that, you have all of the JS ecosystem you can plug right in. Dataviz for custom dashboards, data crunching, video and image processing, all of it. And because you’re not starting with a huge, opinionated plugin/module/contrib, it’s not the clunky and unfun when you need a feature that wasn’t there before. It’s so much easier to build exactly what you need if you’re comfortable with code.
SO much of a serious CMS is just content CRUD, and Payload makes it so simple to define your content types in code, where they objectively should be defined for the sake disaster recovery and reliable builds across all environments.