This is far too dismissive - I'm guessing you don't run a WordPress agency. We don't use WP Engine for hosting, we only use the ACF plugin. ACF is not "very easily replaced" because we've built the site data structures around it and we'd have to completely rearchitect the sites - at our own cost. "Moving our sites" is not easy either because we have 100+ sites, each of which would involve DNS updates (which we often have to walk our clients through because they don't understand DNS at all) and a complete reconfiguration of our build / deploment process. I don't really understand the motivation behind this comment.
What hosts do you recommend that offer built-in development/staging environments? (one of WPEngine's selling points)
On the basis that this isn't an entirely rhetorical question, two I know of are Kinsta and Pressable. We use Pagely, but I have some hand-rolled Bash scripts which perform the same function.
Thanks, it was intended as a bona fide question. Our company does use WP Engine, and while we could total insource it (we already manage our bread and butter app), to do so I'd have to recreate the staging (and ability to push to production) ability (already have some ideas on how to accomplish this easily), but I'd rather save the engineering cycles for our actual product.
Ah yes, the specific structure of WPE's ownership is sufficient reason to move away from them -- but the behaviour and structure of WP's ownership isnt...
Yes? There are without exaggeration 1000+ companies offering WordPress hosting. It's a replaceable product. Nothing WPEngine offers is unique or special. WordPress itself is an entire ecosystem.