I'm not saying they're necessarily wrong... there are certain things where a website should just be dead simple. I built a site for my mechanic, in trade for work on my car. It's like three static pages. Just something to backstop a link on Yelp and Google Maps.
I said simple websites are a dead letter, because it's no longer the 1990s. There's no cachet in them. The web is littered with simple sites that don't rank and no one ever visits. Then the owners think 'maybe I should hire SEO' or 'add a blog' and the question is "wait you built me this site, why can't you just do that for $500"? And that's why I just refer clients like that to someone who does Wordpress now. I have no interest in learning the giant pile of PHP sludge that is WP for projects that barely pay. I hardly build websites at all anymore unless they're SPAs, and only if it's functionality that can't be done with off the shelf frameworks.
To the sibling who said I'm doing this to justify being a freelancer - quite the opposite. I'm telling potential clients of a cheaper way to get what they want, and turning away work that I know is a pointless headache.
Because most non-technical people greatly underestimate all the moving parts in a website, even a simple one.
And yes some websites truly are simple and can be managed with a few Markdown pages and a static site generator (even that can be a barrier to non-technical folk), but any kind of advertising or small business website - even if it's a single page - needs the ability to be updated or managed by a non-technical person and those parts are unknown/invisible at first.
Wordpress, for all it's problems, is one possible solution that can help those people have the website they imagine or want without the sticker shock that comes with the eventual realization that their website (as a whole) is not "simple".
It’s like a lightbulb. Of course, the manufacturing of lightbulbs is a highly technical topic. However, to the user, they present a simple interface (screw it in and flip the switch).
I feel like this is a point that devs often miss. Simplicity from the POV of a user and the POV of a dev are completely different things.
The dev finds a static site generator simple, and WordPress unnecessarily complex. The user finds WordPress simple, and an SSG unusable.
