Is wordpress bloat? What are the alternatives?

>Is wordpress bloat
Yes.

I once saw a company site that made millions and its site had about 200 plugins.

I do know how to write HTML, but it ends up looking bad. I have no sense of aesthetics, don't know what font to use, what colors, how to arrange the elements, how to make it pretty on mobile devices.
Also, markdown editors are nice and easier to work with than vim on a html file on my server.

You can learn design user. That's my point, if you're unwilling to learn how to fix your weakness, you cannot complain about bloat. Everything that's easy to use or has some out of the box type of functionality is inherently bloat because it needs to cover a breadth of capabilities for people who can't make it on their own. You can do something basic to replicate a blog for example by setting up a small PHP template file that when it gets called just fills the proper HTML file that contains the blog you want. No DB or anything needed. You could take a step further and introduce a DB which as long as you know SQL isn't that much extra overhead realistically.

>What are the alternatives?
Either other CMS like Drupal or Static Site Generators like Eleventy. Depends on your use case, sometimes you need a lot of feature, when it's a big project or you have a big team.

it just works, so Any Forums hates it. I personally see no problem in using it for my clients.

So then wordpress is not bloat at all. It's exactly what someone like you needs.

C-c C-e h h

Wordpress is not bloat on anything past a C2D from 2006, and server rent time is dirt cheap since 2010. Writing HTML by hand is turbo-NGMI tier, that shit is only for spergs to trick themselves into validating staying on welfare, to give themselves a "project" they can never complete. You literally can't touch Wordpress' plugins, I mean the big ones like Woocommerce.

Wordpress gets a bad rap for 2, and possibly 3 reasons:
-There are a billion shitty soccer mom plugins like "change ur text font!!!11one" which could be done via CSS. Other major CMSes have these too, Wordpress just has more because they are more popular. There will never be any set of plugins that can replace basic knowledge of CSS and whatever javascript framework you like to do a few basic things. Installing 1000 plugins to do basic little changes will shit up Wordpress, but it will also shit up everything else.
-Wordpress as a long history of getting hacked but this is only because 90% of the time, dipshits don't update and don't take basic precautions like whitelisting the admin folder. Again - same shit happens to other popular CMSes, Wordpress is just more popular.
-Wordpress has its head up its ass about its new editor Gutenberg, it is indeed a complete shit show and everyone hates it, and the devs are being gay and not budging despite literally 5,000+ 1 star reviews on their own plugin review page. You can just install Elementor or Classic Editor or TinyMCE. Again, same shit - other popular CMSes have never shipped a good editor out of the box, you always have to install one.

Wordpress makes your typical Any Forums shitter get angry because he still thinks people will pay him for writing fucking HTML by hand after 2000

I literally make small business websites using HTML/CSS/JS/PHP and I make 80k year doing just that. Stay absolutely BTFO.

Does WordPress have it's uses? Sure, it's a valuable tool in your arsenal. Should it be as ubiquitous as it is? God no, because people (I'm going to assume you) use it because you think it's a silver bullet.

>someone like me
Is it too much to ask for a framework that displays my blog posts nicely? Wordpress themes are a shitshow by the way, I have tried like 30 and not one of them looks the way I want.
For an example of what I consider to be a good blog, consider this:
nextjs.org/blog
>nice fonts
>responsive
>nice syntax highlighting
>works well on both desktop and mobile

Why not actually work and make something? You don't need a framework if you just want to make as simple as a blog.

>80k year

This is the thing, I have tried. My wordpress theme is highly customized, as well as my landing page (not wordpress). The problem is that I don't know what I don't know, so things end up looking kind of amateur.