They have been trying to make a more easily managed solution since forever. All of the work they sponsor on Gutenberg and full site editing in WP has made compl

They have been trying to make a more easily managed solution since forever. All of the work they sponsor on Gutenberg and full site editing in WP has made complete GUI editing of your site completely possible using a portable data format. That wasn’t possible 5 years ago. Problem is, the market for people who want an easy website doesn’t have a lot of money! Not everyone needs a site these days, and many just stick with a single page “link in bio” type thing. So the money is in businesses who need something more… which is by definition more complex. So Automattic has some massive, massive enterprise clients (including government agencies), but there are other more powerful enterprise tools too. Plus, at that point you’re selling a hosting platform and cloud resources, not managed WP. Automattic has even tried to make a newsletter subscription like Substack and it didn’t really catch on (https://wordpress.com/support/paid-newsletters/ https://wordpress.com/support/paid-newsletters/)