Okay. So. Obviously I am not gonna say that the Google Lighthouse numbers are useless because they're not. They have historically been used very well to actually improve "perceived" (more on that in a bit) performances multiple times by a lot of people.
BUT
What I do know however is that it's "easy"1 to literally trick the Lighthouse metrics to show bigger/better numbers that don't actually translate to real world performance/reactivity gains that actual users in the real world would notice. How do I know that? Well
The whole article is kinda based on the fact that these metrics used can be "gamed" (accidentally or not) in order to make it sound like the experience will be better than it actually is are because this isn't a simple problem to solve and no code is truly 100% perfect.
Again, I'm sure WordPress and Ghost are legit BUT there is definitely a case of "these numbers are only really useful to a certain point". As a blog owner I think unless you're writing your own theme... you shouldn't worry about it. Of course if you're there hosting 20MB PNGs on your blog it will suck but it's more a "if you're website shows all red/orange you should absolutely fix something" but getting 100/100/100 is really not that useful if it doesn't mean actually making more money in practice IMO. Which it can for like... Walmart but you are probably not Walmart (no disrespect, neither are most of us).
-
not like... script kiddie easy but... not rocket science either
also gonna say that wordpress got A Lot of stigma after like 2010 because it became cool to hate on php and especially due to the security issues that a lot of installs tended to have
whether it’s deserved or not, wordpress is actually pretty nice to use, the gutenberg editor is very, very nice (and optional, you can just Not Use It), the mobile app is great, the whole thing is very responsive. maff.scot runs on wordpress, and yeah i’ve riced it with plugins because i’m a picky bitch, but out of the box? very good.
it’s also worth noting that i had been setting up my site as a Ghost blog before getting irritated at ghost and trying wordpress again, and honestly there was no difference in how responsive they both are.
biggest drawback to wordpress is the way themes work, and there’s a plugin to let you use Twig templates instead (although the v1 of that plugin got deprecated a long time ago and i don’t understand a god damn thing about how to use the newer versions because it’s now aimed at Developers and not People Who Want To Write Zero PHP)