WordPress solves a lot more than it sometimes gets credit for. It can also turn into a bad choice when it's forced to do things it wasn't built for. Using WordPress is not the problem. Choosing it out of habit, without checking how much it contributes to the product, can be.
When WordPress is more than enough
For institutional sites, media outlets, catalogs, landing pages, blogs, stores, and many projects with manageable content, WordPress is still a very efficient tool. It has a huge ecosystem, a familiar editor, non-technical users can work on the content, and there are mature solutions for problems that wouldn't be worth building from scratch.
If the project needs to publish, organize, and manage content, WordPress usually deserves to be among the first options. And with a well-done implementation, it doesn't have to mean a slow, insecure site full of plugins.
The problem starts when content stops being the center
Some projects start out looking like a website and end up being something else. An internal system. A platform with complex business rules. A product where different users have permissions, states, processes, and data that keep changing.
An application that needs to communicate in real time with other services. That's where it's worth pausing before turning every new requirement into another custom post type, another field, and another layer of logic inside WordPress. WordPress can do it. The question is whether it should.
Being able to doesn't mean it's a good idea
With enough PHP, you can push WordPress very far. That's not a good enough reason to choose it. If most of the development ends up avoiding, modifying, or working around the CMS's natural behavior, you're probably using the wrong tool. A good sign is this:
if WordPress contributes less to the project than it forces you to adapt, it's worth revisiting the architecture.
WooCommerce deserves its own conversation
WooCommerce has a similar trade-off. In an active store, the platform also shapes critical work such as migrating orders and customers without losing changes. For a traditional store, it can save months of development. Products, orders, taxes, coupons, payment methods, and a huge ecosystem already exist.
But when the business has extremely particular rules, multiple inventory sources, unconventional purchase flows, or deep integrations with other systems, WooCommerce can end up being a layer you're constantly fighting against. That doesn't mean you should replace it the moment something odd comes up.
It means the cost of adapting to it is also part of the technical decision.
Leaving WordPress doesn't mean building everything from scratch either
The alternative isn't always: WordPress or a fully hand-built application. You can use WordPress purely as a CMS and consume its content from another frontend. You can split off a specific part of the system.
You can keep WooCommerce for commerce and build the processes that don't belong to a store outside of it. Or you can choose a different stack entirely when the product justifies it. Architecture doesn't have to answer to a technology religion.
Choosing based on the problem
WordPress is an excellent tool when the project looks like the problems WordPress is good at solving. When it stops looking like that, it's worth recognizing it early. Changing architecture early on might cost a few days. Finding out two years later that the whole product is held up by exceptions usually costs a lot more.
The final question is not whether WordPress can do it, but how far its model must be bent to support the product for the next few years.