Last I developed with Drupal was on the v8.x series, latest, ending.
Now Drupal v11.4.x series is current / stable.
I understand to do the installation deployment of the Drupal code and modules, it is required to use Composer.
I used Drush in the past to run the Drupal cron. Actually I preferred to run Drupal cron via Drush as it had verbose output invoked that way... which I would scrape and retain in daily log files. Running Drupal cron via wget gave no verbose output of what was happening.
