While I agree with the conclusion there are many reasons for the decline of Drupal: - the main reason people give up on Drupal 8/9/10 is that it's complex and

While I agree with the conclusion there are many reasons for the decline of Drupal: - the main reason people give up on Drupal 8/9/10 is that it's complex and has a lot of bugs. Some issues are going on for +5 years with no solution in sight, e.g. https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/2752443 https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/2752443 - the old Drupal had a huge community because it was comparatively simple, for instance the hook system that is based on a convention of function names: Name your function something_alter_hook then it gets called automatically in the core. Use another hacky function if you want to determine the order when it's called :) - now there's an abundance of classes, interfaces, design patterns and a custom ORM. You still have the old hooks system that often acts as glue between the old Drupal and the new OOP layer. - super complicated "config system": There's a way of exporting the running "configuration" of a site (core and 3rd party modules) to YAML. So you can version control the config and transfer it between a development and live site. However this comes with many gotchas and apart from simple cases you almost always will run into some kind of problem. - slow adoption of Drupal 8/9 (https://www.thedroptimes.com/9105/why-drupal-7-still-popular https://www.thedroptimes.com/9105/why-drupal-7-still-popular). Drupal 7 is dead for years now but still the majority of Drupal sites are running this version with no intent of migrating. This leads to a decline of the developer community and to ... - low quality of third party modules. There are many good modules but there are also many modules that never reached beta status. It is the norm to have to work with something that's labeled "alpha". - bad documentation. Many times the official docs are just skeletons with the obligatory remark "tbd".