I used to run 5 wordpress sites on shared hosting. For a number of reasons I decided to move to a vps. It had basic resources but nothing special as I wasn't doing anything special. They were all very low traffic sites. But even with that, mariadb kept crashing due to running out of ram. As I was investigating what was going on I also started to realize the huge amount of traffic aimed at my sites just trying to compromise them. I took some steps to secure them but I still kept having issues.

I've transitioned all but one to static sites. Wordpress really didn't bring anything I needed that I don't get with Hugo. With my static sites I don't come close to the resource issues I had. Things are much more secure, there's nothing to "hack". My workflow is simple and I really like it. I edit my posts locally in Atom. I push changes to my git repository and then build the site and use rsync to push those changes to the host. It works great.

So that's the point for me. Much more resource efficient, more secure, gives me what I need without losing anything.

Another option I haven't used but I think could make sense in some situations is using wordpress as a static site generator.