[anonzzzies]

Here medium to larger businesses are not the size as those in the US, but many of them here use page builders as well. There has been quite some backlash to the 'professionally coded web-presence'; long and frustrating processes and the end result is less maintainable than if they had used a page builder so it has to be redone every so many years because 'the tech is outdated' aka the team moved on.

[johnchristopher]

I am in the position of "managing" for clients a fleet of ~200 websites built with a page builder. Every clients has the key to the kingdom and websites have diverged from their original look and feel. The brand recognition we sought for them is all out the window and steering back the whole fleet to a uniform design is impossible. The page builder allowed them to change everything and so they did. It's now up to a point where thousand of regular articles that should have been written with the standard editor have been written with the page builder and just can't be exported/migrated to a new theme.

Of course, it's an extreme but still...

[anonzzzies]

We worked with a large EU firm with multiple offices in every EU country (and a few outside in larger Europe); their headoffice had a bespoke CMS made for them; a huge monster of a thing that was very costly.. The goal of the head office in doing that was to make sure there is consistent branding and design across all the company in all the countries. This inability to not 'stand out' as a company annoyed the branches so much that they all use wp or pagebuilders for the site; cheaper, faster, customisable etc. The cms is only used in the originating country. No-one ones this uniformity that management wants.

Also extreme I guess, but we did a lot of sites for companies where a single company has > 1000 sites (branch, departmental, intranets etc); the head office always starts with 'this is great, we want a cms that has a few templates and we don't want anyone to steer away from that', only to have the complete opposite a year later. We gave up telling them upfront a long time ago as it made us lose the pitch (seems we don't trust our product), but we have 0 companies in the past 20 years that stuck with 'uniformity / brand recognition' lark across the board. With or without page builders.

What I do not like is the waste of content; even when you use custom stuff (wp or what not), you can still make sure the content is stored in json/markdown or something in a central cms.

[mewpmewp2]

Why can't the content be extracted? This makes little sense to me, as you could just even extract content from raw HTML by crawling the websites.

[johnchristopher]

Once they get into the builder for the page they add all sort of widgets, accordion, tabs that only make sense in the builder theme, etc.