Wordpress is still great for downloading a theme from Themeforest to get brochure style sites (restaurant, simple small business, etc) up and running pretty fast. It is not great (possibly horrendous) for revisiting a few years later when all the plugins/theme/core needs to be updated and a bunch of different people have added custom JS/CSS all over in random places.
It's hard to reconcile "pro web designer" with no-code though. Having said that, my preferred stack for something that involves more than a simple site is Sveltekit, Tailwindcss, & Sanity. But everyone has their own preferences.
In my experience, I bought some pro/high sellers/high rated themes on Theme Forest for 3 sites, but all of them come with a bunch of pre-installed plugins, and was a mess.
Specially two who have a mandatory plugin to edit pages, called WPBakery, damn I hated it, is awful, the native WP editor is miles away (Gutenberg), but the design will brake if you use Gutenberg. Also, this and other plugins do not auto-update automatically, for each update you have to login to a site of the theme seller, download a zip, and update the plugin manually. And also on the admin you always gets upsells of the pre-installed plugins all the time, you can't disable it, sometimes you get a rack of 3 top banners simultaneously.
The end user sites looked really nice tho, but the editing experience was horrible.
Yeah some themes are way better than others, that's for sure. This is one of the cleanest and most flexible that I've used on dozens of sites, getting them up and running with a branded look in 2-3 hours:
The templates on this theme looks really nice and modern, will check it out, but it uses the native WordPress editor or a third party plugin? Also, the pre-installed plugins will update automatically?
It's hard to reconcile "pro web designer" with no-code though. Having said that, my preferred stack for something that involves more than a simple site is Sveltekit, Tailwindcss, & Sanity. But everyone has their own preferences.