WordPress offers easy to use framework for web page building (blog or general web page). As it is framework- it contains multiple components, but the installation usually happens as one bundle installation. Ususally there is no need of separate installation of web server, database server, PHP (server scripting), GUI (graphical user interface). The settings can be graphically managed via the web interface. The new content is created using user friendly and intuitive graphical interfave.
Does it have disadvantages? Well… sure it has disadvantages. It stores the content in database, the content is dynamically merged and then served to the user via the web server. There are lot of internal requests and interlocking scripts and this slows the page generation. If the speed is not primary concern, then the penalty for having all dynamically created is neglectable. Several requests per second are completely enough for most personal pages, while static hand written pages can be served more than 100 times per second on the same hardware. Of course there are possibilities to increase the speed, like caching and serving static content from cache, caching proxies (also SSL terminating), load balancers, etc., but they are usually not required for low load web pages. With cache plugin the speed greatly improves. There are multiple such plugins that work nice (even the free versions).
The usual speed disadvantage outweighs the coding overhead. Some “nerds” will still preffer to code in VS Code for example, or even Notepad ++, or even the normal Notepad, but the Nano users are real geeks. Why don’t they use at least Midnight Commander?
Can both “worlds” coexist? Of course. They even play well together- dynamic web pages can be combined/mixed with static HTML pages. The dynamic WordPress content can be made even more dynamic by including AJAX (asynchronous JavaScrips) that on demand modifies the pages at the client side.
So why is this blog in WordPress? Beacuse it easy to create and maintain content. Because it is pretty even out of the box (even before choosing one of the countless themes). The plugins can take care of different “ugly” tasks like creating photo galeries, adding advertisements, etc.
Will I abandon the Notepad coding? Of course not. For some tasks the Notepad is better. It is like having a tractor for a single flower pot- manual weed removal and a pencil as a single tool is almost always better for single flower pot. For large scale projects- larger hardware and more tools are required to perform the tasks efficiently.
After having WordPress page for few weeks, I have noticed that the bot interest has dramatically shifted. Earlier the majority of bots were the normal scanners that were checking for PHPMyAdmin, some WordPress files and generic scans for admin and other credentials, but currently the majority of attempts is for the XMLRPC.PHP file. Even more than the generic IP based page scans.