Any competitor has a nasty chicken/egg problem to overcome. Wordpress is still hard to avoid because there's a plugin—usually with paid support available—that can do damn near anything. The codebase isn't great, developing against it sucks, and the way it's designed and the official store curated does nothing to prevent some real messes & risks on the database side—but, two days of set-up and $80/m in plugins/themes is just a much easier sell than "OK, first we'll need at least two months of development time..."
There's also the scale-benefit that you can hardly throw a ball without hitting someone who's done Wordpress development, if you do need development work, and Wordpress-focused agencies are abundant, if you'd rather not hire to get the work done. Not true for any up-and-coming competitor.
Designing a system—even an extensible one with plugin and theming architecture—that is a lot better than Wordpress isn't a small task, but is also far from impossible and wouldn't take some super-genius team to accomplish; however, that's the easiest step on the path to actually displacing Wordpress in the market.
See also Salesforce and Shopify, whose app store/plugin ecosystems give them a network effect in their spaces in much the same way - but equally tie them to antiquated API surfaces due to their commitment to backwards compatibility.
Damn right. Forget nocode platforms, you can build sophisticated apps by choosing the right plugin combo. And edit some PHP files if needed (or add your own plugin for bespoke stuff).
There's also the scale-benefit that you can hardly throw a ball without hitting someone who's done Wordpress development, if you do need development work, and Wordpress-focused agencies are abundant, if you'd rather not hire to get the work done. Not true for any up-and-coming competitor.
Designing a system—even an extensible one with plugin and theming architecture—that is a lot better than Wordpress isn't a small task, but is also far from impossible and wouldn't take some super-genius team to accomplish; however, that's the easiest step on the path to actually displacing Wordpress in the market.