When Freedom Becomes a Burden: My Blog’s Journey with React and WordPress

From the Obsession with Modernity to the Wisdom of Simplicity

A few months ago, I was raising the banner of war against WordPress—not as a passing joke, but as a frank satire and conscious grievance.
I saw it as a decayed system, surrounded by cheap templates and relied upon by those who have never tasted true control. I used to think every line of code written for it diminished the dignity of code and the honour of precise handcrafting.

I mocked it in my gatherings and warned against it as if protecting my friends from a technical plague.
But now, I write to you from within it. Fully aware, and with a click not without satisfaction.

I am busy.
No, I don’t mean busy for an hour, a day, or even a month, but a busyness that has become part of my life—like the spots that have settled on my face, like the peppermint I boil every day to quiet a restless nervous system, like the shadow of my country’s economic failures stealing my hopes and dreams.
I am busy. Simply.

And because I am busy, I no longer have the luxury to build everything from scratch, nor the indulgence to champion the “do-it-yourself” philosophy every time I want to write an article.
I no longer want a project to flex my programming muscles; I want to write. Simply.

And here, WordPress appeared again—not as an enemy, but as a tool; not as a problem, but as a clever escape.

This is not a text praising WordPress, nor about betraying principles, but about a rare moment of honesty when a technician must listen to their inner voice saying:
“You do not have time to reinvent every wheel. Use one that’s ready, and move on.”

The Burden of Modern Rituals: When Suffering is Embellished in the Language of Efficiency

At the heart of the architectural structure of a React + TypeScript frontend, a strange paradox unfolds:
A system that promises control, yet drowns its owner in a whirlpool of choices.
A language that claims to be a tool of safety, yet ultimately melts into the very valley from which it came — JavaScript.
A transparent shield that scares more than it protects.

In this world, writing an article does not begin with the first sentence, but with setting up a development environment, linking Markdown libraries, converting to HTML, rebuilding indexes, then pushing it all to GitHub.
It’s as if the writer has become a nuclear ship’s captain, required to operate the engine, cool the reactor, monitor the pressure, just to write a line saying: “Hello”.

Worse still, all this towering construction ends up, for the ordinary visitor or search engine, as <div id="root"></div>… an empty pit, only climbed by those who know the magic of JavaScript.

Is this progress?
Or is it a new digital colonisation, making the simple complicated, and the letter unbearable architecture?

Technical Deception: Between Search Engines and the .htaccess File

But I, like any stubborn technician, did not give up quickly.
I told myself: it can be fixed.
It’s possible to build something lean and fast, to trick search engines, to preserve the beauty of the idea and purity of the code.
I was not trying to save what could be saved, but dragging my body behind an old illusion.

In a late attempt to control the chaos, I delved into the depths of Apache servers and began tinkering with the .htaccess file, arranging paths and distributing roles between humans and machines.
A static version for robots, and a dynamic one for humans.
A messy pizza for people, and a sterilised healthy dish for machines.

But even this trick did not keep its promise.
Search engines are no longer those naïve creatures satisfied with any template.
And the battle is no longer fought with code alone, but with patience, time, and availability… all rare currencies in the pocket of the weary.

And so, the first question came knocking again: Why?
Why fight to make the simple complicated, the readable hidden, and the intended lost?

WordPress: The Return of Hidden Wisdom Amidst the Ruins of Modernity

The decision was not a traditional return to the past, but a quiet revolution in a journey stretching between the complexity of modernity and the naivety of simplicity.
WordPress, which I had coldly mocked from my high ground above new developments, returned to reveal a face I had never seen before.
It was not a weak lifeline but a solid block of latent wisdom.

Publishing an article? No longer a tech battle, but a click that sends your words to the world as they are, without excess rituals or exhausting complexity.
Comments system, archives, categories… everything prepared and organised beforehand, as if someone wrote the rules of the game before you started playing.

The real surprise was in the essence of the structure:
— Server-Side Rendering, admired by React communities as a new invention, had long existed here, working silently, creating full pages on the server before they reach the browser.
Pages that read fast, are immediately understood, giving content its full right, without waiting for a heavy JavaScript load.

It’s as if the content returned to breathe, to be treated with a dignity lost in the era of reckless frontends.

On Masked Freedom and Framed Chaos

The fundamental difference was not between React and WordPress, but between two minds.

React represents absolute freedom—unbiased and unrestricted—it does not impose a certain path.
But this freedom is like a vast desert without signs, where all directions are possible, and every step requires a decision.
Do you build using Next.js? Do you write a custom API?
Questions keep coming until you might lose the most important one: why write at all?

WordPress, on the other hand, has a clear and definite vision.
It is a biased system—it tells you: this is the way of the article, this is how it is published, this is where it is read.
These rules may seem strict or restrictive, but it is an authoritarianism based on knowledge and experience, not randomness.
These rules are not constraints but gifts to those tired of reinventing everything from scratch.

Technology When It Swallows Purpose

Ultimately, the conflict was not between TypeScript and PHP, but between efficiency and identity.
Between a creator who thinks genius means complexity, and a writer who seeks a word that is read, not a structure that dazzles.
A blog is not a playground for application-building skills, but a mirror of what we want to say in this world.
And what is not said simply, perhaps is never said.

Liberation is not always about soaring high… sometimes it is about landing on the ground.
To the system that does not demand proof of your genius, but allows you to be human… to write, publish, and be read.

After the Return

I do not think I have reconciled with everything that annoyed me, nor found a magical solution, but I realised that some simple solutions, despite their simplicity, may be more honest than we want to admit.

A light sarcasm accompanies me as I use what I once rejected, because this digital world does not always grant us the freedom we imagine, but often forces us to choose between excessive complexity or considered simplicity.

And this is the essence of the technology worthy of our attention: that it brings us closer to the core of what we want to say, not distracts us in endless labyrinths.

Perhaps, in my next article, I will tell you about this gradual return, about how we began to seek refuge in “Web 2” after failing in “Web 3”. Because the road to the future is not without recalling the present, and the roots we thought we had left behind.