[dpedu]

IME this happens when site developers do not bother to pare down user permissions, at least for users with privilege to edit the site. Which seems to be extremely common, at least back when I worked with drupal - 6.x and 7.x. When you can see every bell and whistle it does get quite messy. But it is possible tighten up permissions and when you do so the controls you don't need are hidden.

[solardev]

IMO this is a failure of Drupal's UX and IA, not just permissions. The software is organized from a DB admin's viewpoint, it's laid out like schema, and has nested layers of configs more complex than my IDE.

The onboarding experience is terrible, too. Compare Wordpress's editing landing page (https://wordpress.com/website-builder/) and editor documentation (https://wordpress.org/documentation/article/wordpress-block-...)

versus Drupal's content editing page (https://www.drupal.org/features/content-authoring), which says nothing at all and just points you to Drupal contractors and sponsors, or its documentation (https://www.drupal.org/docs/user_guide/en/index.html) which is super verbose but has no clear way of getting started.

The whole thing has that "made by developers, for developers" feel, and editors are a complete afterthought. Maybe that was the norm in the 90s and 2000s, but these days there are much more user-friendly, editor-forward options that give them a nice experience out of the box. Drupal never entered that era, and culturally it's still way more focused on the underlying technology than the end-user UX.

It's a CMS that serves admins & management first, developers second, viewers third, and editors last.