[mitaphane]

The Drupal community made a pivotable decision that ensured it would never "win" a CMS battle with WP.

Wordpress has always been a more product-focused blog/site-builder that works out of the box and simplifies code concepts for an average user who doesn't need to know much PHP to get everything they want to be done. It has always focused on open-source PHP CMS as a product.

Drupal has always been an engineer-first CMS; D8 doubled down on that: focus on long-term maintainability with OOP/Symphony/Composer/etc. That decision caused the casual site-builder who knew little PHP code to say "no thanks". It has always focused on open-source PHP CMS as a framework.

Backdrop happened for those who wanted a good off-ramp for those who were happy to keep the current Drupalisms of D7 and didn't need more PHP-web-dev tools. Unsurprisingly, it became more WP-like as it tilted more toward PHP CMS as a product.

The current community of the Drupal world has kept focusing on improving the UX of the site builder/maintainer role with its current initiatives (auto-updates, project browser) to self-correct.

Ultimately, Drupal focused more on its core strength. That's not a bad thing, that's just product differentiation. It turns out the average website doesn't need to maintain a lot of custom CMS code/workflow/logic they just need to track a handful of blobs of text/image content.