Meanwhile, there are hundreds (thousands?) of new Wordpress installs going up every day. People building their businesses and making money without much thought

Meanwhile, there are hundreds (thousands?) of new Wordpress installs going up every day. People building their businesses and making money without much thought as to which tooling is behind their administrative control panels other than the name, Wordpress. You did say, "website." Perhaps you didn't mean to use such a general term. A green field web application may not choose a stack which includes PHP.