> I wonder to what extent that can be attributed to its ubiquity versus its quality
Its quality is astonishingly bad. It was clearly developed by someone who didn't even have a basic understanding of relational databases. Unless something has changed, plugins and themes can run arbitrary PHP on the server.
Anything ubiquitous is going to be hated. I agree. But WordPress is bad from a fundamentals perspective.
But I've been writing web software for 30 years and WordPress is among the worst mainstream applications. It's worse than its PHP competitors at the time, and it's worse than Ghost and many of the competitors that came after it.
You can't just dismiss all criticism of the past because it was the past. Some people wrote worse software than others in the past, just as they do today.
Personally I’m think a big issue is the insistence of wanting to keep everything as backwards compatible for as long as possible. It becomes a burden. At some point you have to accept to make substantial changes in order to improve the situation but it’s not going to happen in the WP ecosystem because that’s one of their selling points.
Its quality is astonishingly bad. It was clearly developed by someone who didn't even have a basic understanding of relational databases. Unless something has changed, plugins and themes can run arbitrary PHP on the server.
Anything ubiquitous is going to be hated. I agree. But WordPress is bad from a fundamentals perspective.