What's the main goal of your website? Is it for professional use, and what do you need it to do?

WordPress is a very powerful CMS that's been developed for over 20 years and works well out of the box. But, as you said, it requires updates and maintenance, which can be frustrating. Finding something similar but simpler is tricky. I'd recommend looking into Ghost or Hugo - both are lightweight alternatives. Maybe Jekyll. Still, you'll need to spend some time learning how they work and do programming.

I had a similar experience when I tried using Vue.js and Nuxt. I'm not a frontend developer ether, and I just wanted to build a pet project, but it turned into endless debugging, so I gave up. Later, I tried Next.js, and it felt much easier to work with. Now I actually enjoy learning and exploring the framework, and since it's closely related to React, I realized the skills I was gaining could be valuable for future projects or even for collaborating with other developers. Anyway, it's still a lot of work.