> you could reimplement all its basic features easily in a weekend with AI

Cloudflare did that:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/emdash-wordpress/

I haven't heard of anybody but Cloudflare using it though.

Name recognition still means a lot. WordPress is baked into most hosting platforms now so SMBs just reach for it. Most of them won't hear about this b.s. and honestly the platform can continue to run on momentum for years.

There's a whole ecosystem behind WordPress that, while it's a security nightmare, is also pretty damn useful. You can't vibe code that yet, you have to build it over years, if not decades.