If Wordpress is simple, easy and fast to setup/maintain depends
a lot on how many plugins you need, if you can use a theme out of the box and so on.
With every customization WordPress and it's ecosystem gets exponentially complex. That's at least my experience with it.
So if you are fine with one of the buyable themes and don't need many plugins WordPress is okay.
But for me it's a lot faster and easier to setup a 11ty, Laravel or whatever and write some custom HTML, throw in tailwind and sometimes if needed some vanilla JS.
The benefit: I can edit the markdown content in GitHub UI, in my IDE, in iAwriter on my smartphone/tablet and if it's a customer project he can use forestry.io to edit content in a beautiful UI.
I'm always the owner of my content, it's in a platform independent format and it's versioned via git.
And for sure the responses are also a lot faster (static HTML) and the look is more unique.
So it depends a lot on your needs, expectations, requirements and if you want to spend more money or time and more one-time at start or more over the full timespan with maintenance and so on.
The easiest and fastest is medium or dev.to or similar.
More advanced but also expensive and requires the most maintenance is WordPress or ghost or any selfhosted CMS.
And the most unique, one-time setup but nearly zero maintenance is any kind of static page generator/JAMstack hosted on netlify or Zeit/Vercel.
All these solutions are incredibly difficult to get into or scale up or down, I think even most developers I know would have a hard time wrapping their heads around it. Generally speaking whether is's a small team or a large team, using a hoard of different interconnected services is only possible if there's only one person in charge of everything.
What I'm looking for is a simple service that anyone can use - the way Blogger or Livejournal were meant to be before dwindling - but that remains scalable and user friendly across the whole process - unlike wordpress or the installation heavy solutions outlines here.
What I hear about are services made by developers, for developers, without much care of whether or not a broader audience can access these products (or actually, some seem to expect a broad audience to use their products, unfortunately that's not how it works)...
There are millions of people in the world who have bad experiences with technology, or don't use it at all, or are afraid to use it, because of the gigantic digital divide between people who grew up learning programming languages for fun at school, and people who grew up with record players... and I don't think the divide will disappear anytime soon, since every single user of tech has their own definition of what is "simple", "usable", "easy to setup".
So, right now, when you want to empower people who are not developers by pointing at a modern, decent-looking blog they can use, there seems to be no solution. When you spend 70 hours a week programming and coding for a client, and you wish for your "time off" to be able to have a blog that's simple to keep and maybe even free, to spend most of your time off outside, not inside, there isn't a solution.
Another thing that I notice is that the definition of "blog" seems to be confused with the definition of "website" for a lot of people. Fo me a blog is composed of separate entries with a title, and body that can be text and images or sounds. A website is a global web entity with a home page, a contact page, sometimes a gallery page, etc, depending on what the site's purpose is.
Like I said, something might have gone wrong, but Livejournal and Blogger were simple tools, aimed at a wide population. I'd love it if there was something of the same style in terms of ease of use but with a possibility to scale up or features such as FTP hosting, etc.
I keep circling back to the same ones I mentioned earlier, blot, typehut, proseful, indexhibit...
