Question unrelated to the actual story - is anyone running a WordPress.com blog as just an API?
I've had a few friends ask me to work on their WordPress blogs but I turn them down unless they're willing to migrate to something like Squarespace or Ghost. Most of the time they won't switch because they're used to the WordPress admin. Being able to just fetch a JSON API would actually make me think about working with WordPress.
You have both https://developer.wordpress.com/docs/api/ and https://github.com/WP-API/WP-API that can be used for something like that.