alt Hacker NewsPitch this to whoever is in charge of performance at Wordpress.
A Wordpress instance will happily take over 20 seconds to fully load if you disable cache.
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Microbenchmarks are very different from optimizing performance in real applications in wide use though, they could do great on this specific benchmark but still have no clue about how to actually make something large like Wordpress to perform OK out of the box.
Wordpress is something that I cannot believe hasn't been displaced by a service that uses a separate application for editing and delivery.
It seems like something like vercel/cloudflare could host the content-side published as a worker for mostly-static content from a larger application and that would be more beneficial and run better with less risk, for that matter. Having the app editing and auth served from the same location is just begging for the issues WP and plugins have seen.
Much like anything else your performance is going to vary a lot based on architecture of implementation. You really shouldn't deploying anything into production without some kind of caching. Whether that's done in the application itself or with memcached/redis or varnish or OPcache.
Are you talking about a new, empty WordPress instance running the default theme? Because if so, that doesn't match my anecdotal experience.
If you're talking about a WordPress instance with arbitrary plugins running an arbitrary theme, then sure — but that's an observation about those plugins and themes, not core.
As someone who has to work with WordPress, I have all kinds of issues with it, but "20 seconds to load core with caching disabled" isn't one of them.