In reply to mark k..

@mark These are simply different priorities from different contributors. I don’t think they necessarily contradict. I absolutely agree with @afercia that WordPress should try as much as possible to produce semantic markup out of the box, and this is exactly what Gutenberg does. Nevertheless, there are use cases for when straight HTML needs to be entered, such as when pasting embed codes from 3rd parties (e.g. MailChimp). The introduction of the Custom HTML widget and block are not attempts by contributors to push for users to create HTML soup, but rather it’s an effort to empower users who need that ability (as they always have).