I’ve ended up using something like the “headless WordPress” technique mentioned in the article on one of my websites, though I use a simple Django front end to

I’ve ended up using something like the “headless WordPress” technique mentioned in the article on one of my websites, though I use a simple Django front end to pull directly from WordPress db. It’s super fast. I really like WordPress’s out-of-the box classic editing experience and revision history. It’s probably missing some of the “strict guide rails” you probably want, but I can at least disable user-uploaded plugins which helps a lot.