> It may not be very hard to maintain, but you still have to maintain it.

When the maintenance is "ensure auto updates are on, and don't do anything that would not get updated automatically" it's not like it requires regular effort.

> Whereas if you just have a collection of articles that you want to keep around as an archive, if you convert them to a static site, you can basically forget about them afterward...

Your web server, your operating system, etc. still require at bare minimum the same level of maintenance.

You can outsource that maintenance to someone else of course, but you can do the same with WP as well.

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My point is that WP alone doesn't massively increase the maintenance burden, it's what people tend to do with (to?) WP that increases the burden and eventually leads to unmaintained sites.