(Disclaimer—I work for Strapi). I would love to know why you think Headless will not cut it or what Strapi could improve. We're seeing many SMBs succeed with it.
I really like Strapi, it's very intuitive, etc. But headless is a headache to set up for a tech illiterate person/org who wants to start some kind of blog or small news site.
This is a relatively simple site that posts housing development news for New York. Ultimately they're not going to need a super complicated front end. Most sites just want a theme and deployment.
If Strapi had a non-headless mode and had themes I'm sure it could be used for the many millions of these small sites that run Wordpress.
Additionally Strapi isn't a great choice for blogs or portfolio sites, it's simply too much to set up for most people. I think the barrier to entry is what prevents it from becoming great. If a random person can start a blog, then more developers are going to want to work on it, meaning more plugins, meaning more of a reason to use Strapi. A feedback loop that got Wordpress to where it is.
Shopify is so big because they make setting up a site extremely easy, and now there are tons of plugins and themes to use on your Shopify store, which only gives people more of a reason to use Shopify.
Disclaimer I work for Strapi. Great article! Have you tried Strapi Cloud ? we just released a new CLI to make the deployment process super easy https://docs.strapi.io/cloud/cli/cloud-cli
