Wordpress is often chosen because it provides the less technically inclined with a nice management interface. If there were rock-solid web interfaces to edit content on static websites, we'd begin to have a serious contender to Wordpress. In the meantime, static websites will unfortunately be reserved to us technically inclined people.
The bloat caused by even a bare minimum WP site versus html/css is breathtaking.
Let's say you need to put up a simple brochure type site. You can do alot wih just 2-3 MB text/pics. With WP, it takes about 10MB just to get it running.
And let's not forget the DB backend of WP. This alone vastly increases complexity, at least for average users.
Scale this up and you see how bloated WP is. You want to put up 100 brochure sites (each about 5MB). With html/css sites, that translates to what 500MB of data? With WP, that already is 1000MB. And add requirement for a DB backend for 100 websites. The bloatness jumped by at least a factor of 2 with just the requirement for more storage. With DB requirement, the bloatness jumped imo by a factor of 5 or so.
