I agree. I don’t hate wordpress. It seems a bit dated by today’s standards and bloated in some aspects but you can definitely make a solid, fast website with it. It’s getting a bad reputation for its toxic plugin dev scene and crappy sites built using Elementor.
oh boy, the average wordpress site has like 30 plugins and the top bar is getting cluttered with so many plugin upsells that it fills the whole screen. There’s a huge industry of people making wordpress sites who shouldn’t.
It’s quite frustrating to be asked as a dev to “fix” people’s site as my usual response is “shut it off and redo it well”.
Coding is pretty much the only way to make a site that is both flexible and fast. If you wanna stay with page builders, I’d recommend something like webflow or framer but going with these closed systems is really not that amazing longterm. You’re gonna sink a lot of money into a system that will almost certainly enshittify in the future.
If you’re willing to pick up coding, try to make your own theme with something like Advanced Custom Fields in wordpress or switch to something like Kirby CMS which is more flexible out of the box than wordpress and has great docs.