How do you stay sane while adjusting / customizing a Wordpress Blocks theme?

Warning: rant incoming.

To me, the workflow of using wordpress to skin a theme is absolutely *appalling*.

Want to get a simple client website up and running, they didn't want to have any bespoke code or setup just something simple. I don't do a lot of WordPress, but sure. Let's get this done quickly.

Tried about 4-5 themes and it feels like I'm going insane. There's a column container block with column blocks inside it and when I change the columns from 3 to 4 and add a 4th column, it seemingly gets some padding out of nowhere, unlike the existing 3. No matter what block I select, the sidebar says 0px padding defined. Still gets padding. I have to rely on outlines on hover to discover the structure of these nested blocks; when you go into the code editor it's all just inline styles and json style/layout-adjacent garbage.

I select another block to change its background-color using the new "Patterns" section, only to find out there's (escaped!) css variable names inserted magically (and the background color is apparently defined elsewhere).

There's so much inline (styling) code that simply selecting one of the blocks takes a good second because of all the re-rendering happening and whatnot.

*How* is using WordPress in 2025 helping people get things done quickly?