A version of this is on my own site too. (I work on UnfoldCMS — but this post is about WordPress DX, not a pitch.)
A developer joins a WordPress project in 2026. They open functions.php, scroll past 800 lines of add_action and add_filter, and quietly open LinkedIn in another tab.
I've watched this happen. I've been this developer. And I want to be fair: WordPress DX isn't bad because the people maintaining it are bad. It's bad because the platform was designed in 2003, around PHP 4, and has grandfathered every API decision since. The gap to modern stacks isn't closing — it's growing.
This isn't a "WordPress bad" rant. It's a look at why the developer experience fell behind, with the same task written both ways so you can judge for yourself.
TL;DR: WordPress's DX problems are structural — global functions, hooks-and-filters as the main extension model, untyped data in wp_postmeta, no first-class testing, IDE autocomplete that dies at the hook boundary, and a deploy model still shaped around FTP. Modern stacks fix all of these by default. The gap decides your hiring pool, how maintainable the code stays, and how fast you ship the next thing.
