I got a bid to take my D8 site to D9 that was $30K. I couldn't even upgrade for the absurdly low price-point you mention creating a Drupal site for. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. For D5 and D6 I saw tons of small and medium sized businesses and nonprofits on Drupal and now there are very few. Cost and complexity are the top reasons. Yes, Drupal can save you money, but it'll save smaller organizations far, far, far less than something like Wordpress, hell from what I can tell Drupal is more expensive than any other open source CMS out there. I've been using Drupal 15 years and I know my organization is done with it now...or more accurately Drupal is done with us. It left us and others like us behind and a $20K Drupal site built on anything other than a distro is practically impossible and has been for many years now.
I got a bid to take my D8 site to D9 that was $30K. I couldn't even upgrade for the absurdly low price-point you mention creating a Drupal site for. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. For D5 and D6 I saw tons of small and medium sized businesses and nonprofits on Drupal and now there are very few. Cost and complexity are the top reasons. Yes, Drupal can save you money, but it'll save smaller organizations far, far, far less than something like Wordpress, hell from what I can tell Drupal is more expensive than any other open source CMS out there. I've been using Drupal 15 years and I know my organization is done with it now...or more accurately Drupal is done with us. It left us and others like us behind and a $20K Drupal site built on anything other than a distro is practically impossible and has been for many years now.