Seeking advice about headless WordPress

I have been learning frontend (HTML, CSS, JS, React) for the past year, and a little backend (MERN) for a couple of months now, and I want to work on some real world applications. I have a few friends who have ageing websites that were built for them and they are willing to hire me to renew those sites (I'm also happy to volunteer in the case of some NPOs I am connected with.

However, almost all of the aforementioned sites were built using WordPress, and that is what these friends are familiar with. I'm. Not really interested in learning WordPress inside out (or going into PHP) so I'm wondering if headless is one way to go. I only recently heard about it so I'm here for advice.

Does it make sense in my case to use headless WordPress, to use my experience on the frontend but to allow users to continue writing blogs etc on the backend?

Would it still likely require a lot of maintenance, unlike a pure WP site?

Are there any specific frameworks I should use? And is there good documentation/ do any have good tutorials out there?

Thanks for any help!