The Wordpress community is less tightly intertwingled than Reddit (or Twitter, for that matter) was.
The chance of negative social interactions occurring goes up with the number of interactions, not the number of participants. In a dense community, this is O(N^2). In a sparse community, where participants subdivide into cliques that have little or nothing to do with each other, it approaches O(N).
Specific social features all have different effects on the degree of interconnectedness on a site. In particular, things like unified user profiles, retweets, direct-link shortcuts to either user profiles or posts, navigational links, and real-time engagement increase the interconnectedness. Things like no-comment links (np.reddit), time delays, separate domain names for different subjects, subreddits, few links between different communities, separate user accounts, etc. reduce the interconnectness. Social sites exist on a spectrum from individual communities (4chan, HN, forums, etc.) to densely-connected but partitioned networks (Twitter, Reddit, Discord, and Facebook) to publishing platforms (YouTube and Wordpress) to sitebuilders (SquareSpace, Wix, etc.) The latter end has virtually no problem with miscreants because it has virtually no social interaction; the former has a big problem with miscreants but has enjoyed the benefits of higher growth, higher engagement, and more ad dollars, except that if you go too far toward the community end, the community self-limits its size through rules and customs before it becomes big enough to monetize.
Wordpress has benefitted from slower growth - because they're basically a publishing platform rather than a community, they don't face the same problems that being a community has. (They didn't get the benefits, either, which is why Facebook is a $500B company and they're not.)