I've read more than i care to remember about wordpress and coding, and i'm not a professional, just a self-taught person who started over 10 years ago making his own websites for his own business stuff, seo etc, so i guess i'm a jack of all trades online, for my own ideas not for customers.
BUT
I see so many so called professional people who use wordpress and they are all about pre built themes, page builders etc, and i've never understood why fully.
Obviously, we have new tech come along, flex, css grid, all of it would have been amazing years ago, page builders a bit before those, and seemingly more recently stuff like tailwind (although i see it has been out about 5 years! and i don't see too many people talk about it lol).
So i looked at making my own theme from scratch a few days ago, no theme ever suits me, all filled with shit, drag and drop this, learn all the nuances, i mean i was using DIVI for years but a few days ago i just lost my shit with it when the code module kept freezing anytime i wanted to type code, so i made my own theme for the first time ever, and decided to use a framework, i was gonna go with bootstrap but it feels too old now and i discovered tail wind a few days ago… fuck me that shit is good.
So far i have worked on front-page.php and with the help of GPT i have a home page that is gonna look super professional, with a CSS file that currently has pretty much nothing in it.
How amazing it will be, after years of page builder shit, to just go into the php files and make simple edits.
Naturally, for people making their own websites or people on a very limited budget i can see why page builders will continue to have some relevance, but i reckon with tailwind anyone who is at least somewhat skilled would be fucking nuts to carry on using other peoples themes and page builders. So i guess i'm saying don't make the same mistakes i did, as page builders ARE soul destroying.
For some it works for others it doesn’t and that’s why there’s so much division in the community. At the end of the day how does what you care to use help your clients. Not trying to be rude by any means but You focused too much on your own experience in this thread and feel that others should have the same experience and opinion. That’s not going to happen. The beauty of
Open Source is it can be what you want
Page builders are fine if you don’t mind bloat, can’t code and are positive that you’ll never need something bespoke for your site.
Plenty of people are fine buying a theme and just designing it.
What you dont seem to understand is not everyone is you and what you like.
Page builders are an issue for YOU, not everyone.
There is something pure about custom code