I've seen a fair few projects spun up on Squarespace/Webflow/Craft, but none of them seem to have the same quick on boarding and up and running feeling of Wordpress. What did you choose for your marketing site and why?
Yes. Wordpress is more customisable and extendable than the rest.
Squarespace, Webflow and Craft are either proprietary, have huge hype by newcomers (especially Webflow) or have missing features that make you want to go back to Wordpress.
I am sure that you can make a basic marketing site in either of these but you also mentioned 'CMS' and Wordpress is the easiest and the most extendable.
Yes. A resounding Yes. You can try to do it in other cool things but if you want to build a serious marketing site which can be managed by non technical people, WordPress is the way to go. I am a technical founder who runs a SAAS and I have been playing around with things like Hugo, Netlify, headless CMS etc but WordPress kees beating them due to the speed, maintainability and time to market factor.
Don't go crazy on Plugins especially shitty 3rd party and you will be fine. Don't listen to people who dislike PHP and all that.
Within reasonable bounds, I dont think the numbers matter as much as the business behind them. Using large scale and reputable plugins is the main thing.
Also Id suggest hooking in with some alert system that tells you when there is a known vulnerability. So many sites site un-updated for years with open flaws. Auto update probably helps this for low maintaince types, personally I dont auto-update most plugins to avoid the occasional release issues but use centralised management software so Im updating close to real time.
Templating is straightforward.
No 1-click install themes but also no inscrutable unchanged-able spaghetti code.
It’s just a clean predictable and reliable dev process out of the box.