Comment by luckylion

I'm not arguing against its usefulness, not at all. The sites I work on use it as well (and abuse, you really shouldn't do complex things with it), though we're looking into replacing it with something custom because the dev experience is bad and the performance isn't great. But for the average small to medium site, it's great, especially because of what you mention: the standard use cases are super well documented by a million people having gone through them before you.

I wouldn't call it high quality though. 200k LOC even for the free version (I use pro), no OOP, global variables, bugs get no attention unless they're major. It was amazing when it first came out, but it has fallen behind even compared to core + other plugins (and the WP average is a very low bar).

It clearly belongs in core, just like 90% of Yoast's (or AIOSEO's, Rank Math') functionality, Redirection and permalinks, and they should have focused on getting that done instead of gutenberg. But also clearly this isn't the way to bring it into core.