Drupal is very popular in government and higher education. It's a very flexible and non-opinionated CMS, so it's easy for a developer to build something really crappy with it by not following best practices. When Drupal 8 first was released, there weren't a lot of off-the-shelf modules like there were with Drupal 7, which resulted in people building some pretty crappy sites in some unconventional ways.
The situation has really improved in recent years. Drupal 10 and 11 (the latest stable versions) are mature, the module ecosystem is robust, and there has been a renewed focus on usability.
It's not the right choice for every site of course, but I think people who have had a bad experience with it in the past should give it a second chance.
What are the advantages over something like Wordpress? What are the advantages over something like Laravel or Django?
My assessment of Drupal is that it really is only for enterprise blogs - it doesn’t offer the things a more robust framework would offer. So it makes sense if the scope of work is a blog for a large organization that has 100,000 to spend on a blog. It seems like most Drupal contracts are in that range, so it becomes more of a game of scoring those contracts than anything else.
The situation has really improved in recent years. Drupal 10 and 11 (the latest stable versions) are mature, the module ecosystem is robust, and there has been a renewed focus on usability.
It's not the right choice for every site of course, but I think people who have had a bad experience with it in the past should give it a second chance.