In reply to steve stern.

“Lately, it seems that WP now views its “customers” not as bloggers or website owners or individuals making plugins/themes, but agencies and hosts.”

I actually think it’s the other way around. WP catered to professionals (agencies and freelancers) for many recent years but have now returned focus to bloggers and hobbyists. The Gutenberg editor proves that. These new and constant changes drastically affect websites that have been custom built for clients. Frequent updates and new design changes (major UI overhauls) pretty much ruin any custom work that has been added for them. Developer plugins like ACF are looking like they may become redundant. I’m not saying this is a bad path or anything, but I know that many agencies are looking at other mediums to build out client sites now that the update/maintenance cycle can’t be trusted.