To me Wordpress sounds exactly a suggestion you'd get from someone who doesn't have to maintain it. I.e. frontend dev.

How so? I maintain two WordPress websites and really "maintaining" means I get an email telling me it automatically updated every so often. I spend more time on it restarting the server because it was updated to a newer kernel (it runs on Debian Stable, to give you an idea for how often that happens).

I do agree that if you need plug ins, that appears to get messy very fast, but the default WordPress site does everything I want and requires very little for maintenance.

On the other hand, Wordpress is for the reality that most people don't have a developer on hand (nor should need one) to update their website.

I believe the grand-grand-parent used Wordpress as an example to his/her argument. You can use any other battle tested CMS solution if Wordpress is too heavy for your needs.

For example, I like Ghost (https://ghost.org/) for my personal needs.

Huh... Maybe I haven't done anything too complicated in WP, but I didn't find it bad.

Worst case I use a dedicated PHP page and MySQL. But in reality I think I usually put my code in functions.php(?) And it works fine.