While I'm pro-Gutenberg (see my answer above), the WP editor pre-Gutenberg was absolutely fine for "non-technical users" too. It's adoption, for regular users like plain blog authors and journalists and so on, had already been massive (in the "tens or even hundreds of millions userbase" level massive...
But I think that limits you to two universes of setups - either built by a "pro" (for some definition of pro) who configures everything, installs plugins, installs and customizes the templates and basically gets everything perfect OR very basic cookie-cutter installs with lots of limitations.
Either of those scenarios is fine, and I think it's great to have an ecosystem of small designers whose customers are DIFM users. I agree for "blog authors" and writers it's also fine, subject to the above limitations.
The reality, though, is that market is tiny - "tens or hundreds of millions of users" - I do not think there are in the hundreds of millions of blog authors getting active traffic, though I maybe buy "10s of millions". Tumblr alone has 500+m active sites, even if we assume only 10% get actual consistent traffic (which would be roughly consistent with the data I remember), that alone is 50m active sites. If there are 10s of millions of bloggers, we would expect that the active # of sites are in the single-digit millions.
'Catering for everyone' is an ego-trip that's resulted in page bloat for everyone whether they wanted it or not.
But if you want to view the market as "getting everyone on the open web who needs a presence", it's hard to see how Wordpress the product is meeting that need. ~1/3 of US businesses have no owned/managed Internet presence at all (and the number is even lower outside of the US). Of the ones who do, something like 15% of them (iirc) are only on Facebook and/or Instagram, and that number is growing.
Let's take that small business owner who doesn't yet have an online presence and give them a default Wordpress install, and then let's give them a Facebook business page creator - which one do you think they'll be more successful at completing? Or if I need a simple blog/newsletter - let's try Wordpress vs. Substack or Wordpress vs. Medium - which is going to be easier?
If you say that's not the target market for Wordpress, that's fine, but every interview with Matt Mullenwig gives me the impression HE thinks that's the target market for Wordpress/Automattic - everyone who needs an online presence. By limiting Wordpress to only technical users and/or websites that are built by pros, it's basically ceding swaths of the user population to these purely commercial platforms that are open to varying degrees.
Put another way - what data do we have that shows that “everybody from kids to grandmas” started sites on Wordpress? And to get more specific, how many of those users either had help getting it set up, or used a template and made zero changes to it, or had a hosting provider build a site for them using a builder atop Wordpress? Because the data I’ve seen suggests that users really struggle with any customization of a Wordpress site, and I think the adoption of Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy’s website central, etc. shows that there is a real gap there for Wordpress.
It’s fine if Automattic wants to say that Wordpress is just for web developers and HN readers, but I think they really want to build the website platform for everyone, and that’s not happening with Wordpress without things like a real page builder.
(Full disclosure, I used to work at Squarespace and will freely say that the squarespace page builder at the time I was there was not great, but it was usable by regular people)