Originally known as the Roots theme, it was a rock-solid HTML5 starter theme aimed at providing a cleaner starting point for new WordPress websites. Many top brands use Sage and/or Bedrock for their websites. Due to the fact that both are in alpha, they are not included in this article, but you should definitely keep an eye on them. The Roots team also has two additional tools in development: Acorn, a plugin building framework, and Clover, a plugin boilerplate.
This has also caused many WordPress developers to live in a WordPress bubble, not being incentivized to learn new and modern front-end development technologies, and sometimes get stuck in the “good ol’ way” of doing things.
However, while this can help those that still use legacy environments with old PHP and MySQL versions (which is a security risk in itself, but this is not the topic of today’s article), it also caused newer WordPress releases to not make full use of the latest PHP capabilities. This focus on compatibility understandable given the sheer amount of WordPress websites online today. WordPress has been around for ages, at least by internet standards, and its philosophy has always been to preserve backward compatibility.