The main difference between old and new WordPress is that back in 2012 I could set up WordPress, add a theme and mess around with CSS for an hour or two and have a good-looking site in less than three hours. With Gutenberg and block editing, from scratch to produce something similar would now take 1-2 weeks of work on it 6-8 hours a day. Even with experience, it’d take just about that long because nothing is “canned” anymore. You have to create it all; nearly nothing is provided. And if you don’t know CSS, you’re totally screwed.
While I am smart enough to understand and work with the terrible block editing “features” and all of that, themes no longer work so as mentioned everything is completely custom. It’s part of attempting to make everyone into a developer. Similar to how Firefox broke all their extensions, the assclowns at Automattic decided that they knew better than their users and foisted something off on everyone that was “better,” but didn’t actually work particularly well for anyone.
The enshiffication train is picking up speed all the time.