This was obviously posted in the wake of the WordPress drama, but I landed on Payload while feeling stagnant after 10+ years building on WordPress. Everything else I was doing was 100% TypeScript, my entire professional career had been working with metadata driven data structure, I felt right at home with Payload.
It's just enough structure (full admin area, API, GraphQL) to make scaffolding a basic site (with authentication) quite easy. I had built an app using Next 13 before Payload began integrating directly and using the local API (versus making HTTP calls to a server endpoint) is very clean. It feels like WordPress (i.e. you're editing "client" code on the "server") but with a LOT less cruft.
Because it's headless, anything goes on the front end. One big reason that WP got so big was because of the theming capabilities. Payload has extensibility by way of plugins, but it's (obviously...) not as robust as what's available in the WP plugin repo. It'll be interesting to see how these alternatives fare against the more prescriptive tools like Ghost (which does support theming, but does not support custom fields in any way, shape, or form).
That being said, I'm all in on Payload moving forward. If you're curious, go straight to the v3 beta -- it's very close to release and plenty stable, in my opinion. Happy to answer questions.
(Not affiliated with Payload, just a big admirer of their work)