WordPress Themes Are Architectural Debt I have been building websites since the early 2000s. Over the years I have worked through table layouts, inline styles, early CSS frameworks, jQuery-heavy themes, page builders, shortcode ecosystems… all the way to Gutenberg. And honestly, Gutenberg felt like a clean slate for WordPress. For the first time, WordPress did not feel like a collection of templates stitched together with plugins. Blocks made sense. Reusable components made sense. Structured editing made sense. It finally felt like WordPress could evolve into a proper publishing system. But while building real projects with Gutenberg, I kept running into the same issue again and again. The blocks were modern. But the architecture around them was still fighting the past. Themes were still controlling too much: layouts spacing typography rendering behavior CSS overrides responsive logic plugin styling The deeper I built with Gutenberg, the more I realized something important: The problem was not Gutenberg.…