I don't think I could ever go back to SSR like WordPress. My only real concern with SSG is if the build will work, and even when it doesn't it's never an emergency.
Whereas the concerns for something like WordPress is
1. Has our website been hacked and publicly defaced?
2. Has our website been silently hacked and is being used to secretly distributing malware or worse, aka the FBI randomly shows up at your business.
3. Will updating one random plugin nuke your entire live site, resulting in multiple sleepless nights? Will not updating it cause your site to get hacked also resulting in sleepless nights?
4. Or better yet something in your underlying environment changes and nukes your site, usually in the middle of a weekend out with your family, and your hosting provider pinky swears they didn't change anything. So you spend your whole weekend investigating just to find out your provider did change something, usually something stupid too.
5. Considering all the above your off-site backup solution is vital so better keep that maintained and thoroughly tested as well.
6. Plus a thousand other reasons to waste time, worry, and lose sleep.
We're talking about blogging here, not business-critical website infrastructure. If my blog went down I wouldn't lose a sleepless night over it. I'd figure it out later.
If I were choosing a CMS or tech stack for a critical piece of infrastructure my requirements would be different and I might find some other tool.
Also, if all these were so much concern, I doubt so much of the web would run on Wordpress. Yes, you need to keep your install and plugins up to date. But you need to keep your toolchain up to date no matter what you use. Risk of breakage on update is a thing everywhere, not just Wordpress. I'm by no means a Wordpress fan, but it really is not as bad as it's painted.
> Also, if all these were so much concern, I doubt so much of the web would run on Wordpress.
I used to run a company that all we did was wordpress, joomla, and drupal maintenance, performance optimization, and hack recovery. It very much was and mostly continues to be that bad.
> Risk of breakage on update is a thing everywhere, not just Wordpress.
Ya the issue with server side rendering is that your live environment is made of up dozens to hundreds of difference software stacked on top of each other and they all pretty much need to work perfectly to actually work and or not be vulnerable. And if you use something standard like cpanel to manage your environment, add another 1000 layers of complexity to the stack.
And lets not even go into all the work it takes to have that environment have decent performance and run on reasonably priced hardware.
Where as my concerns for my SSG live environments basically amounts to, is the host publicly accessible? To be vulnerable you would need to do something very stupid like set file permissions to 777 or something.
Again, we're talking about blogging, not business sites or SSR or CMS tooling. Very different needs with very different solutions.
I personally don't think it's that much work, and definitely not complicated, to keep my software up to date. And as a blog all I need to do is cache / throw behind a CDN and I'm golden. Nothing complex going on here. No headaches, no late nights, not even a wink of worry.
I think you two are talking past each other. Yes, people use WordPress for serious websites, and WooComerce stores, and all that stuff. But Tallain is not talking about those people. Tallain is talking about blogging.
Blogging is also often business critical. Entire businesses are built around blogs. I presonally know someone who sold their "wordpress blog" for $30m.
Whereas the concerns for something like WordPress is
1. Has our website been hacked and publicly defaced?
2. Has our website been silently hacked and is being used to secretly distributing malware or worse, aka the FBI randomly shows up at your business.
3. Will updating one random plugin nuke your entire live site, resulting in multiple sleepless nights? Will not updating it cause your site to get hacked also resulting in sleepless nights?
4. Or better yet something in your underlying environment changes and nukes your site, usually in the middle of a weekend out with your family, and your hosting provider pinky swears they didn't change anything. So you spend your whole weekend investigating just to find out your provider did change something, usually something stupid too.
5. Considering all the above your off-site backup solution is vital so better keep that maintained and thoroughly tested as well.
6. Plus a thousand other reasons to waste time, worry, and lose sleep.