The difference is the experience. With WP, you sign up for a hosting service that offers WP, get a text box, type things in it, and press "submit" and you've got a page on the web.
The challenge is getting a similar low friction way to deploy content with a static site generator. Github pages is kind of ok - but it requires the person to have a base level understanding of git (commit and push).
To dethrone WP, there needs to be a similar experience. I'm reminded of iWeb of old ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IWeb ). This isn't saying it can't be done - but the underlying technology isn't the issue.
That gets the 70% solution. For the next 20%, you're targeting people that have some php skill and can tinker with templates and databases but aren't... Software Engineers. A sibling of mine falls into this category. Needs more than a static site generator but doesn't have the time / experience / background to design a bespoke site for the use case. Cobbling together WordPress that was inherited from a previous iteration of the organization with the occasional ChatGPT helping out question is enough to handle the needs of the site and its users.
For the remaining 10%, you've got the people who use WordPress and are familiar with how to make it really work. Static sites are an option for some cases here, but their experience is deep in the WP stack rather than crafting the site by hand themselves. It's easier to modify the templates and tools they've developed to work in WordPress than it is to create a new one. And it gives their clients an easy way to update the content.
For me? A static site would work... and it's in the bottom of my list of things to do to migrate to Hugo or the like. Or maybe even make my own as a personal project (I have a fondness for the old accessible web).
However, I don't believe that the static site generator works for the majority of the WP userbase in its current form (as much as I'd like it to be the case).
Agreed. I much prefer to pitch Hugo on the basis of its costs: It takes more knowledge to set up, but it also lets you host your site for free on a ton of places, like GitHub Pages, and that knowledge can be a very useful stepping stone for future devs will are interested in getting more into the web dev space.
That's why I wrote https://github.com/Siilikuin/minimum-viable-hugo way back when - to give myself just enough of a clue of what was going on that I could pick it up from there. Hugo makes an excellent stepping stone between "I know how to write HTML in Notepad" and "I can code up my own little web apps in Django", etc
For sure, Hugo looks pretty great! But I'm also a software engineer. I'm just saying it is disingenuous to suggest that it is easier than WordPress for nontechnical folk.
I would also add that the static site generators have little if any decent templates to work with. Most of them are so basic that to get them to any level that looks good, it will take a lot of work. For instance, if you use Gatsby, then you're going to need to know ReactJS to be able to do change anything or improve on it. This is true with virtually any static site generator.
Contrast that with Wordpress which has literally thousands of really well made, well designed templates that take minutes to install in your CMS. Because there is a such huge variety to choose from, finding one that fits you the best is relatively easy which also means the changes you would have to make would be minimal.
Most basic hosting services to this day still have a one click Wordpress, Drupal and various other CMS installs. GoDaddy advertises they have a one-click Wordpress install.
You are correct that if you plan on using your local machine for development then yes, you would have to know PHP and MySQL. Then you would need to know a bunch of other stuff in order to do that which opens another can of worms.
In my experience, this is what also makes Wordpress attractive - the low overhead to get up and running. Most people/businesses I know who used WP, just got a hosting account, transferred their domain and did all their development right on the production version of their site.
