I use Wordpress extensively and I find the whole Gutenberg switch to be absolutely atrocious. From the design to the technical implementation.
And it is also received as such. The classic editor has been downloaded millions of times.
What worries me most is that the developers haven’t responded one bit to these issues (if I read the relevant issues) and it solves no problems.
It feels a lot like the technology du jour was picked and molded in a preconceived idea of a page builder. Forgoing a lot of that professional page builder plugins do great and much better already.
So the absolutely silence on these criticisms is what worries me most.
And yes, using react feels like a bad fit, it creates another layer where none needs to be, like the article stresses.
True story: I opened a couple issue tickets on Github for Gutenberg. Both very real and legit. To say the reactions from that team were hostile is an understatement. I've since promised myself to not try to help. It's not worth it.
I have a self-hosted blog with Wordpress and the change from classic editor to Gutenberg was like re-educating yourself to writing with your weak hand. Yuck.
In the meantime, I got used to it, because I did not want to fight the development direction that was seemingly set in stone. And, to be just, Gutenberg got better. Nowadays you can pull most things off in it without thinking twice.
But once you start horsing around with something untypical in mind, woe is you.
Before Wordpress my go to CMS was Drupal, but it suffered from the same problems. It took 3 years to even port the most standard and most used plugins to the new version.
I think its a bad sign if there is such a massive opposition to the direction and it is disregarded completely.
And like you said, once you start using atypical situations, it becomes a unnecessary complicated affair. Luckily you can dismiss Gutenberg, thats the only upside.
If WP ever (probably not) gets away from the "everything is a post" approach, none of the gazillion plugins will ever work again. WP only gives you things, if you use its classes, so the tendency of its users is to make everything a post, but a post is (surprisingly ha!) not the correct abstraction for everything. It is in fact a very bad design.
Many of the often touted so high number of users of WP are however, rather casual want to host a blog kind of users, who really don't need much more than posts and plugins, which take care of implementing stuff on an unfitting abstraction, ehich remains invisible to the casual user.
And it is also received as such. The classic editor has been downloaded millions of times.
What worries me most is that the developers haven’t responded one bit to these issues (if I read the relevant issues) and it solves no problems. It feels a lot like the technology du jour was picked and molded in a preconceived idea of a page builder. Forgoing a lot of that professional page builder plugins do great and much better already.
So the absolutely silence on these criticisms is what worries me most.
And yes, using react feels like a bad fit, it creates another layer where none needs to be, like the article stresses.