I would imagine there are many superior products but it's the inertia of Wordpress that can't be defeated. Same with Reddit, etc. When network effects reach their highest level they really work against us.
WordPress is $5 in a VPS, click a theme, add a few plugins, it’s an insecure mess but it was cheap. Need a designer? A few thousand bucks is cheaper than a programmer.
It’s not the network effects. It’s about doing things cheap and fast, for which WordPress has no parallel.
And no, this is not a problem with capitalism. Every social structure ever devised has done this. Even if you’re McDonalds and you want new marketing pages in 2 weeks for a 1 week campaign, WordPress is fine. What else are you going to do? Build a CI/CD pipeline for a 1 week website?
WordPress is for people who don’t work at FAANG. If this is the best they can do so far, there is no reason to believe they’ll do better next time. And that’s okay - we can’t all be FAANG. FAANG standards would be considered delusional compared to most code out there.
Remember that WordPress is the way it is, and it still has a multi-billion dollar company behind it. This is the best a normal, non-FAANG, billionaire organization could do. Which shows, in my opinion, how much of a bubble the code quality purists actually live in.