Since I was a teenager in the 90s, I've always maintained a web presence of some sort and I've seen the popularity of personal websites wax and wain over the years. I used to spend a fair bit of time writing content for my website and I would get quite a lot of interest in the articles I published, over 10,000 unique visits a month - the google ads would yield a $100 cheque a couple of times a year.
Things change. People share information in different ways and many more people are doing it now. There are people putting out incredibly high-quality and well-researched content so it would take a huge investment of time, thought and effort to compete with them. Readers don't interact with, share and contribute in the same way either. There's no point having a website with comment sections or bells and whistles because almost nobody will use these features.
It makes little sense to have a full-blown LAMP server dynamically generating what has become a rather static site, so I've moved to lektor, a static content management system. This setup gives the best of both worlds in many ways - a straightforward CMS, but without needing a server-side scripting language or database.