Wordpress does very well on motte and Bailey - the core is performant and secure, but if you try to do anything with just core, you’re told to install any number of (quite good mind you) plugins.
For example because of latest updates to PHP 8 they have deprecated the $var{key} syntax - who the fuck uses that?! I did not even know it existed until some of my clients' websites crashed after I updated PHP.
It's an absolute minefield since we moved on to the PHP 7 branch. I am glad for PHP because the language sucked before because of how lenient it was. But it creates a lot of work for me.