Your response is about what I expected, in that it's the same thing I've heard for 25 years from people who's entire argument oft boils down to little more than either "I don't want to learn" or "I don't actually like websites".
The majority of the issue being right there, this nonsense about "aguring varying aspects of websites" which is nothing more than people ignoring why they exist, who they are for, what they are for, and the rules, specifications, and guidelines that separate professional work from amaturish blogs for grandma.
You might think that you didn't say you don't care about things like accessibility, wet, etc, but the things you did say clearly not only imply it, they're driven by it. HTML and CSS aren't terrible choices to accomplish these things, THEY WERE CREATED TO DO SO!
That you don't find them quick or efficient is likely driven by the fact you didn't learn to use them properly with a user-focused ideal. That's a guess, but without seeing something you've built using them it's hard to say if you're just flapping your yap, or have the experience to form a rational informed opinion. As you failed to provide actual real world examples of anything, it's very hard to guage just how qualified you are to say anything about it.
Whereas when I write articles bashing garbage like frameworks or "art first PRETENDING to be design", I always try to provide real world comparisons.
Like your complaint about "drawing" layout in a text editor; the alternative -- abusing paint programs or dicking around in WYSIWYG editors -- are the equivalent of letting a child with crayons design a building.
Actually, it's more like letting a graphic artist pretend they're an architect. Placing form so far ahead of function that the result are goofy elevated walkways basically DESIGNED to collapse, dams that burst only a year after construction, and death-ray architecture.
I've been fighthing that nonsense since high school some 34 years ago, where the community I grew up when they built a new high school. They didn't put any fire extinguishers in the tech wing because it "conflicted with the clean look of the rooms", had all the doors opening inwards to "maintain the artistic sweeping lines of the hallway designs"... both obvious fire code violations... and then there was the main entrance.
The artists under the DELUSION he was an architect put holes in the ceiling to let light in... when the floor above was the entrance to the library. First the hole based floor was causing dirt from those walking above to land on people entering, the holes made it impossible for women in heels or people on crutches to get to the library. So they filled them in with glass which acted as magnifying glasses so the pervs could look up skirts. So they burnished the tops of the blass to blur things, and it went death-ray architecture turning the entrance into a hot-box where the fixtures started to melt and there were burn spots in the carpet. So they painted over the glass in grey primer, which resulted in the entrance having to have its brick walls torn out so they could put in normal walls to add something they should have just had from the start... LIGHTS!
And this artsy-fartsy crap ended up costing so much of the budget, that when it came time to actually build the English department wing, all they could afford was to glue together a bunch of mobile homes JUST like the school they were supposed to be relieving the load at so their "pods" (mobile homes) could be torn down.
Same "Artist who thinks they're a designer" idiocy as the Walkie Talkie, Aon Center, Vdara Hotel, the Stada Center at MIT, and every other blasted time some artist goes off the rails in "architectural" or material choices for "ooh pretty" bullshit.
Websites are the same, and having some artist draw the facade whilst completely devoid of the underlying engineering principles that must be met is begging for disaster. The same as letting an oil painter draw a building without a single lick of architectural knowledge, thend handing that painting directly to a construction crew!
You also go to the false assumption that I'm saying you can't make it pretty. Making it attractive is well and dandy, so long as you're not violating accessibility norms or making the page so hard to use even the able bodied can't accomplish what they came to the site for. As I've said hundreds of times the past 20 years, accessibility isn't just about able-bodied vs. the disabled, it's about EVERYONE. Like the example of curb depressions where it had the unintended side-effect of benefiting cargo deliveries, children, the elderly, and not just the wheelchair-bound they were created for.
And it's not "ironic" when people sue for a company VIOLATING THE LAW. The US, UK, Canada, the EU, Australia, and so forth all have LAWS about accessibility. The Amercans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and UK's Equality Act (EQA) are legitimate laws regarding all forms of accessibility, including websites. Going full on moustache twirling corporate villian from a '80's movie about that is like bitching about wheelchair ramps and handicap parking spaces, or acting like one of these "coal rolling" dirtbags running over cyclists.
And it truly does require a complete lack of a brain to think that the "trade offs" for garbage like Squarespace is worth it for a business. The slow speeds resulting in high bounce, being blacklisted from search, and flipping the bird at accessibility and usability makes websites created with it worth less than a sheet of used bog roll. Any business who uses them effectively neutering their chances of success, begging to be dragged through the courts, and creating a financial money pit for what's more often than not sites that a qualified developer could belt out in a day without any of those problems.
It's comedy gold too you talking about businesses focused on their bottom line given the technical debt the tools you are advocating and defending and their effect on it. At BEST it reeks of the credit mentality -- pay more later for something you can't afford now -- a societal woe that's pretty much destroying everything. At worst it costs more time, more effort, and more money all because someone involved in the process started crying like a petulant child "wah wah, eye dunz wunna lurns".
They provide the ILLUSION of ease, when all they do is make you work harder, not smarter.
It's to that end your talking about such rubbish being "highly efficient" reeks of not even knowing what a website IS. A painfully common lack of knowledge since most people can't see any farhter than the screen they're sitting in front of.
Thus why sure, there's what people "want" to do, and then there's what people SHOULD be doing. There's a reason it's called "work" and not "happy happy fun time". Frankly, what a lot of people "want" -- the garbage you're defending -- is the polar opposite of what web technologies are even for.
And it's evident in your "80% of the work for 20%" when it is not nor should be any more work than the rest, it's an integral part of using HTML and CSS properly and a littel tiny bit of sitting the **** down and learning can result in it being LESS work overall than any of the other methods out there!
Thus your claiming "PHD level knowledge" is also comedy gold, given that HTML is basically 4th grade grammar, and if you can't grasp what CSS is and how it works with a junior high education, you likely end up dropped into remedial classes before you end up a high school freshman!
Though admittedly I'm basing that on what was 4th grade in the '70's and high school in the '80's... so by now given where education seems to have gone the past 30 years, maybe that is 8th year college now. The literacy RATE might be at an all-time high, but the quality is in the gutter. Look at what Medium considers a 10 minute read, where at that speed a Michener novel would take a decade to get through.
Seriously HTML and CSS are SO simple, I don't understand how or or why people have repeatedly spewed the same gibberish claims for a decade and a half... because you're not saying anything new here, you're just saying the same things I always hear from people who pout like a little child "wah wah, eye duns wunna lurnz".
Though a fair share of the blame lies in the W3C's lap, with the specifications for writing websites not being written for people who write websites, but for those writing browsers. A natural result of the browser makers being the 800 pound gorilla's in the room. This leaves us relying on third parties to learn from where a lot of them still have their head wedged up 1997's arse. See predatory scam bait riddled with outdated lies and disinformation like W3Schools, frameworks like bootcrap or failwind CREATED by peopel unqualified to tell others how to build websites, and the "visual appearance first" ignorance.
To that end, the people who don't want to learn to use HTML or CSS do NOT want to build websites. They want to sit there spanking their crank on a graphics tablet drawing pretty pictures... because again websites are about MORE than what things look like on YOUR devices. It's about what it does on EVERYONE's devices.
Something that drawing a picture isn't going to give you, and a little understanding and the underlying languages hands you as quickly, easily, and better than dicking around in photoshop or some goofy WYSIWYG ever could!
And that's something I just don't understand when people say the things you did. The claims that it's somehow harder or takes longer, which is more often than not utter bullcookies if you implement all the things websites are -- and should -- be REQUIRED to achieve, much less the reason they exist in the first place!
Especially artsy-fartsy BS that tells large swaths of users to sod off.
BUT I can see how people can get tricked into conclusions like that. I mean if I was just learning this stuff I’d probably think HTML and CSS were confusing garbage too when confronted with incompetent code like this:
<div class="flex flex-wrap place-items-center h-screen">
<section class="relative mx-auto">
<!-- navbar -->
<nav class="flex justify-between bg-gray-900 text-white w-screen">
<div class="px-5 xl:px-12 py-6 flex w-full items-center">
<a class="text-3xl font-bold font-heading" href="#">
<!-- <img class="h-9" src="logo.png" alt="logo"> -->
Logo Here.
</a>Requiring some massive bloated train wreck of framework asshattery, doing the job of this HTML:
<header id="top">
<h1><a href="/">Site Title</a></h1>
<nav>And this CSS:
#top {
display:flex;
background:#000;
}h1 {
flex-grow:0;
padding:1.375rem 2rem;
font-size:1.5em;
}#top a {
color:#FFF;
text-decoration:none;
}
HTML/CSS is easy if you stop pissing what things look like into the markup and bother learning how blasted easy selectors are. PEOPLE are making it hard by refusing to learn it.
Particularly when the visual first approach requires 20 times the planning to be responsive, generally ends up flipping the bird at users who need/want elasticity, is always implemented as a bunch of fixed designs instead of planned for proper responsiveness, and not only tells accessibility to go plow itself, but as a side effect ends up guaranteed to get blacklisted by search.
ESPECIALLY now that even search is penalizing fat slow loading websites. I’ve heard it for twenty years the nonsensical “but everyone has broadband now” typically from those who’ve never hosted websites with real traffic. The pipe out of the server is only so wide and can only handle so many connections, and bloated code spread out over hundreds of files can bring servers to their knees. “Oh just throw more hardware at it” cuts into the bottom line a hell of a lot more than “just code it right in the first place” and “tell the artsy fartsy guy to keep it in his pants, we have specifications to meet here!” More so when the complete ignorance of what a website is even for with the artsy fartsy crap getting in the way cuts into audience reach and retention because the end user actually doesn’t give a rats ass.
Doesn’t matter how pretty it is if you’re telling the audience they don’t matter.