For the last couple of years, the development of the Block Editor and the Block Theme experience has seriously stagnated. ThemeForest, a popular WordPress theme marketplace, literally has less than 0.01% of Block Themes published on it.
Because if you want to use a theme based on Blocks, it means that you have to change your entire website's theme and its structure. You basically have to start from zero. It's almost as if there are two versions of WordPress being run at the moment (Classic and Block), and while everyone remains on Classic, the developers keep pushing for Blocks.
Blocks and Block Themes might be easier to work with for a modern developer, but the Editor is far from being "stable" and very few theme developers/designers are even interested in publishing themes for it. After this long of a period (WordPress 5.0 with Gutenberg merged into it was launched in early December 2018), WordPress is still failing to capture the attention of its users.
The Gutenberg Editor experience is alright, I guess. It still has its quirks and performance problems, but for designing individual blog posts it's not terrible. It's the whole "everything needs to be blocks, but only if you start from scratch" approach that is damaging the community.
> The Block Editor project for WordPress and beyond. Plugin is available from the official repository.
But if you want to manage that amount of things and and distribute the work, you need to keep accepting PRs.
And at that point, the project will start to become extremely complex if the pace is too high, unless there is someone who enforces strict standards for every PR.
There is a risk that it slows down the process and reduces the amount of contributions.
For reference, Ari is a sponsored WordPress Core Contributor.
The Wordpress actions and filters approach is solid and if you use an IDE like phpstorm it gives an amazing development experience because you can simply “search through autocomplete” possible hooks and read/check which one is better, the other main thing is you can always debug what’s happening as Wordpress php code base is extremely good.
Now for the block editor, what really helped me was copilot and ChatGPT , the documentation for Gutenberg is not the best so sometimes you had to go through the GIT repository to understand how some things should be done, but for the “initial push” on how to approach a block development generative AI is a really good help.
I honestly like Wordpress a lot, the security part is for me one of the drawbacks, you need to keep updating it along with the plugins. But, for a modern good looking and versatile blog , writing in Wordpress and pushing the generated pages to a static website host like GitHub pages is awesome :)
A devcent web designer could setup an html theme and skin it with CSS. I really tried hard to theme with this system, but I gave up about a year ago. Can’t be bothered, it seems actively hostile to people developing WP themes.