Most other software wants more than the $100 one time payment that some random WordPress plugin demanded (VikBooking.)
I'll give the example case from my real life.
My wife and one of my best friends want to start a blog. My wife has some wordpress experience from her last job.
There isn't a big expectation for revenue, this is a hobby project.
At least when I did my 'shopping', a managed wordpress instance as far as cost, was somewhere between 'as cheap as just doing self-maintained custom solution hosted' and 'a little bit more but the extra 3-10$ a month versus my time to actually maintain it' stopped me dead in my tracks of Vibe coding an alternative.
IOW, the 'long tail' of wordpress, is the ecosystem of managed providers that exist where the user (at least as long as they are careful about plugins?) doesn't have to worry about updating the core bits, the provider takes care of that for them and can do it at a volume that makes it palatable.
"Some random WordPress plugin" is usually the main entry point. The core has a bad track record, but plugins are worse by far.
You just patch and redeploy.
The company is being kept alive by 1. People who Google “how to set up an online blog/store” and click the first link and 2. Those who are already in too deep and don’t want to make the effort to migrate.
Unless you want and can go with Shopify and go all in on their platform, WooCommerce is what you need to host an online store on hosting of your own choosing. Alternatives seem to lack the numbers to tackle issues when something goes wrong without too much downtime.
(WooCommerce being a popular WordPress plugin.)
At least it's better than ZenCart.
It was also the worst absolute time to pull these stunts. Between static site generators, LLMs, and the open internet dying - he couldn't have picked a worse time to do his massive mask reveal power play. Wordpress was on the precipice of irrelevance and he gave it a massive shove.
I did plenty of WP back in the day and I agree, historically, but each of the strong answers I had in my mind (db integration, editor, plugins, themes) are weakened substantially by the AI agents' ability to port a working site to a new framework. I totally agree for normal users still but for devs taking jobs on this do you think the barriers to switching have come down in size?