Yes and no. There's two ends to the spectrum: over-enginerring and spagetti. Basically overplanned layers of abstraction agreed by distributed committee vs unp

Yes and no. There's two ends to the spectrum: over-enginerring and spagetti. Basically overplanned layers of abstraction agreed by distributed committee vs unplanned mess. A bunch of modern frameworks have gone far too far over the abstraction cliff, but as bad as it gets for people wanting to contribute to those core libraries, the APIs provided for extension and integration are mostly sane, as is error logging. Most importantly of all, they tend to be reasonably stable and secure at their core: updates are less mandatory and LTS cycles are longer for past library versions. So while your complaints are valid, I think the pros and cons weigh heavily against WordPress. Yes, when something broke I could always dive into my WP install with a quick fix, but I never had any way of being sure it worked everywhere (automated testing is nightmarish), never knew how long my fix would last; whether it would be an editor contribution or a plug-in update that would break it, etc. etc. Side effects in WordPress are absolutely out of control.