I do a lot of WordPress hosting. I more or less agree with you: I really don't think most orgs are served by having custom theming. I've done several websites

I do a lot of WordPress hosting. I more or less agree with you: I really don't think most orgs are served by having custom theming. I've done several websites at the low 6 figure range. I've seen a lot of work go into fine details. To me that's fair: good design is just a lot of tiny tweaks iterating toward something simple, and that's what the designer I work with does well. If that makes the people we're working for feel good, then yay. If it helps, most of that cost actually goes into data modeling, migrating/ cleaning the data, training users on the admin system, or connecting the site to an ERP and writing functionality to render that data. Or requirements gathering, process documentation, publication strategies, or whatever. Another side is that most of the off-the-shelf stuff I see won't pass our a11y audit. Which is important to me not just from an ass-covering direction but because I really think that blind folks ought to be able to use the web. As to the author's point, just locking down what users can do should be good enough. I've been crapping out WP sites in an hour for my musician friends, and my hope is that full site editing gets good enough that I don't need a theme, just a good plugin. But yeah, in general you're right. I tell folks that they should concentrate on finding some good content, and then the rest of the crap doesn't matter.