WordPress Playground: A WordPress that runs entirely in the browser

WordPress work certainly doesn't pay a lot, but for PHP in general there's a large cavern in the middle. You can get very, very high salaries/contract rates as someone experienced with PHP if you are extremely experienced with PHP - specifically because so few people are willing to stick with it to that point. There are just a lot of legacy systems in very large companies that run on it.

So if you already have the experience, it can be worth it. If you don't, then trying to get mid level or even "low senior" PHP jobs probably isn't worth it compared to another skillset.

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However.

I will now take this opportunity to vent a bit, though it has little to do with your imminently reasonable post. Mostly because I am procrastinating on porting a 3rd-party SSO system from a very old and shitty WP site to a new and shitty WP site and it's hurting my brain to decide how much of the mess of jQuery and bootstrap I really need to keep.

So hopefully this will be understood as venting and not a personal attack against your reasonable observation.

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Consider that there are those of us who have to fix the first group's problems and make things keep working so they don't have to care how the sausage is made.

That is to say, there is a very real third group of folks: those of us who support the first group.

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I've been doing that work for about 14 years for all kinds of folks. I host 300 or so WP sites for a mid-sized university, I built and maintain a .gov site for a three-letter-agency, and I've built plenty of react-based blocks (across 3 majorly different patterns because the GB team doesn't give a fuck about anything, as far as I can tell).

I've worked on every element of WP from deploying servers to fixing CSS so it works in IE6, to scraping non-availible CMSs so that I can migrate thousands of pages and tens of thousands of images to WP. I've written plenty of WPCLI commands to do dumb tasks, I've written plenty of shit-tier code to make, say, calendar events propagate across the bad-for-most-purposes multisite functionality.

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Someone has to know how the sausage is made. I do.

And I know the difference between the teetering pile of steaming crap that is WP.

I've worked on actually useful codebases in my life with tooling that is easy and databases that are grokkable. I am aware that other platforms have issues, and have encountered them in my work.

However, WP is really bad.

And I have no problem bitching about it- I'm burnt the hell out and am about ready just quit and live in my truck and play music.

It's a shitty platform, and people do not pay well to keep it working.

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So anyhow, yeah, you've got a fair point, but there those of us who, because of circumstance, keep heading back into the burning building that is WP and our collective hatred of the platform is well-founded.

I don't mean that there are zero people making good money in PHP, just that it requires flying a rather tricker and less-certain course to get there, than with other options.

I really might put PHP top-of-page—at least, in some contexts—if marketing myself as a high-priced contractor, for the reasons you mention... but, in hunting for ordinary jobs, I no longer even bother looking at PHP listings. Too much chaff, not enough wheat, and it's been like that for a decade or more. Just way easier to find an employer with compatible pay expectations, with other languages, if we're talking run-of-the-mill jobs. Shorter searches, more-consistent outcomes.

Also imagine the software layers at play here. Whole PHP Interpreter plus whole thousands of lines from WordPress codebase plus SQLite.

Amazing when that's all so much totally useable.