I completely understand how people got burnt. The move forward was less about bringing users, site builders, and developers along for the journey and more about providing what enterprise needs.
And one of the enterprises that was front and center was Acquia, Dries' organisation that he set up to offer consultancy services based on Drupal.
Having said all that, it is genuinely a very good product now, and one that LLMs are incredibly good at building with.
The high level of documentation, convention over configuration, and the API-driven nature of Drupal lend themselves very well to LLM assistance.
Considering just how awful WordPress is in terms of security, community, cohesion, code quality and maintainability. I think it's a crying shame that Drupal has lost so much goodwill.
I'm not sure what the solution is, but I'd recommend anyone reading gives it a try with Codex or Claude code, and you'll hopefully see what I mean.
Drupal needs to market how well it can people make $ or at least save. ROI is a good KPI to bring up, if the team has data to back it up, etc.
Saying that Drupal is better than it has ever been is not much of a statement. It still isnt as easily extensible due to having a smaller community of contributors as an after effect of mismanagement.
I hope they have improved, but their reputation has been earned repeatedly.