This situation is pretty atrocious, but what it really points to for me is how misguided in general the “no code” PHP-averse approach to Full Site Editing is.

I fought using Gutenberg at all for 4 years, finally reluctantly embraced it last year, and have been trying all sorts of tricks to shoehorn PHP logic into my new base theme. (Fortunately, using shortcodes hadn’t occurred to me, so I had a weird hybrid of ACF Blocks [often with no custom fields] and Block Patterns [grossly misunderstanding how they work].)

Ironically, entirely unrelated to 6.2.1, yesterday I finally decided to give up and rework my theme to use PHP templates instead of pure HTML block templates. I was able to get rid of all of those dumb workarounds. Now I am even more glad that I did!

Site Editor (FSE) is not at all a useful tool for experienced coders, and it’s not suitable for end users of professional sites built on WordPress (users who shouldn’t be modifying the appearance of the site in the first place). It, or something like it, definitely has a place… but it’s not for the majority of people I know of, who are using WordPress in a professional, CMS-type capacity, and not “just as a blog.”