My own recent experience with this - i run a small sass web app and about a year ago i decided to partner with advertising company to help with the grow.
Part of the plan was that they will remake our static homepage in Wordpress bc it will be easier to manage it for them and also easier to add a blog, which was part of the new plan. I know Wordpress is slow and i would say unnecessary also but i said yes bc i did not want to micromanage them.
A year later we parted our ways and i was left with WP where the page load was abysmal(3-5 seconds) and about 10Mb of bs. There was something called "Oxy" or "Oxy builder" which would add a tons of style,js and clutter to the markup and kind of SPA page load style but horribly failing.
So now i migrated the site to Jekyll, got rid of all the bs and it's back fast. And for me also again possible to really improve.
So for my businesses i'm not touching WP ever again and that will be a huge bloat reduction in itself
Seems like your issues were not with WP itself, but with whatever plugins and themes were added to it. Avoiding WP entirely for this is like avoiding a programming language because the 1 developer you had experience with sucked at it. WP itself can be very fast, as is evident by a ton of high profile sites running it (CSS-Tricks, TechCrunch, New York Times, Time Magazine, etc). I'm not a fan of WP myself, but that's just because I don't like how its built and how it entirely avoids modern programming standards, not because it is slow, which it most definitely doesn't have to be.
Part of the plan was that they will remake our static homepage in Wordpress bc it will be easier to manage it for them and also easier to add a blog, which was part of the new plan. I know Wordpress is slow and i would say unnecessary also but i said yes bc i did not want to micromanage them.
A year later we parted our ways and i was left with WP where the page load was abysmal(3-5 seconds) and about 10Mb of bs. There was something called "Oxy" or "Oxy builder" which would add a tons of style,js and clutter to the markup and kind of SPA page load style but horribly failing.
So now i migrated the site to Jekyll, got rid of all the bs and it's back fast. And for me also again possible to really improve.
So for my businesses i'm not touching WP ever again and that will be a huge bloat reduction in itself