I understand this is where WordPress originated and excels, but the time and cost to set it up are still high. If I were a business owner and I could pay someone 2500 to set up a good blog or news site, etc on WordPress. I would get a great result I would be happy with. The problem is I can pay some young kid with a laptop $500, and they can replicate someone else's existing blog, etc and change the CSS slightly; it will look and function the same.

I think it's hard to compete on initial setup when someone is using Claude. Now for expensive projects where the client has the budget for a custom site and a real design team. I think WordPress is fine. But at that point, my question would be why? You have the resources to code by hand at that point.