Let’s face it, WordPress’ reputation among PHP developers is atrocious. It is, for the most part, justified by the questionable code quality of most plugins (because the barrier entry is very low), the will of the core developers to keep backwards compatibility at all cost, and, as a result, its architecture.
However, as you may have noticed, this blog is running WordPress. Why would you ask me? Well, despite all its flaws, WordPress is stupidly easy to use and complete. I considered using Jekyll on GitHub pages but realized that I would miss many features that I like. I can have comments without relying on external services like Disqus, after all I start to appreciate Gutenberg, I do not have to rely on third-party providers for something as simple as a contact form… and I’m OK with running a server for my blog as it would run anyway.
That being said, there are a couple of things you can do to make your developer experience pleasant, or at least way less painful than you would think maintaining a WordPress website.