Greetings All,
Years ago I created various sites using Dreamweaver and just uploading via FTP - I'm not an expert in coding but I was capable in other areas like graphics and had enough knowledge to be able to add JS and PHP to the .html files.  Now after a few years of being away from making sites I find that Dreamweaver has kind of run it's course, and I'm not going to pay tons of money for the Dreamweaver CC, although by all accounts it's not so good now either.  

I'd rather create sites as I've done in the past using some kind of WYSIWYG editor so I can actually not spend hours of my time trying to get my head around WP sites and the 'blocks' which personally I really hate and I hate the lack of flexibility.  I do think WP stores aren't too bad, although only got the Phoenix software to work ok and not that much of a fan of Woo Commerce - so after a long winded rant could someone please offer some advice how I might get back to creating sites as I used to , to some extent , or do I just accept that I need to lock myself away and have to learn to use the builders in WP?

Thanks in advance.

You can still buy old versions of dreamweaver. But the days of wysiwyg are long gone. These days sites need to be responsive which really means using a site builder or writing code.

Not quite sure why you hate blocks so much. Because more and more people use phones for browsing page layouts tend to be a lot simpler. If you build for mobile and adapt for desktop the idea behind blocks makes sense.

I don't use WordPress, I'm a little old school and still build projects by hand, less is often more. WYSIWYG sort of died as fisicx says, there's too many screens to deal with. At the same time I'm not a fan of massive frameworks, overkill for many projects as they're designed to consider everything when you might only use 10% at best.

Where to jump back in will depend what level your html / css / js are, for example did you stop pre media queries? The process of code > upload > test still works, and yes many will say 'But I work at X big brand and only proper developers use Y...' but that's their bag, plain html / css works, simple and effective.

if you're looking at site builders, have a look at Duda. if you're hand coding have a look at Tailwind css

Must admit that although I use Wordpress I still code mostly by hand