To be honest, I never found WordPress easy to use. It's all flowers and rainbows as long as I can find good themes and plugins. However, it starts going south as soon as I need to make a very small custom change.
I switched to ghost, at first it was a bit rough around the edges, but since they made the global cli. It has being quite nice. For blogs, would rather use that than WP. Of course I also prefer JS instead of PHP.
NPM is ubiquitous for frontend development, even when the backend uses a different technology.