Twelve years in, and I'd bet my career on it again tomorrow.
I've spent that whole time watching people trash Drupal who've never actually tried it.
Not “read a comparison chart”. Not “saw a tweet”. Not “heard it's hard”. Tried it. Opened it, built something real in it, maybe hit a wall, and worked out why the wall was there.
Every “Drupal is outdated, SharePoint is better, why not use WordPress” comment I've ever seen comes from someone who bounced off the learning curve in week one and decided that was a verdict instead of a skill issue.
Here's one example of what they missed. Drupal has had a dedicated security team publishing coordinated disclosures since 2005 — severity score, CVE, patch, release date, before the exploit is even live. WordPress finds out it's vulnerable when everyone else does, at the same time, in public.
And the thing that annoys me most: twenty years of people mocking Drupal for making you define content types, permissions, workflows, revisions. Overengineered, hard to learn, they said.
Then AI agents showed up needing exactly that. Structure, not vibes — and every “modern” CMS is scrambling to fake overnight what Drupal has had built the whole time.
Is it the right call for your cousin's wedding photography site? No. Obviously not.
Is it the right call for anything that can't afford to go down, get breached, or get rebuilt from scratch in three years? There's one answer, and it isn't the one with the nicer onboarding screen.
Call it niche. I call it the only platform that was ever actually built to still be standing in twenty years — and it is.