When the page builder became the product

I have built plenty with Elementor and Divi. That is not a confession. It is experience. You cannot critique a tool you have never shipped under a deadline.

The turn happens when the builder stops being a delivery method and becomes the architecture. Then every design tweak is a fight with CSS specificity and DOM weight. Updates become scary. Performance work becomes archaeology.

Custom themes and plugins are ownership. The business should own its rails, not rent them from a widget marketplace forever. If you are unsure which side you are on, look at your homepage source and ask whether you could rebuild the money pages without exporting a mystery.