Generally the people who buy licenses for these products are either people who want to make their own website with WP and stumbled upon the website builder tools or, more significantly, agencies or single person companies who are making a lot of websites for small businesses. Lots of restaurant, small businesses, etc need simple websites that look good, have the info there they need, are editable without blowing up and don't want to spend a lot of money. So they will pay 400-1000 dollars to their web dev who buys a website builder license with part of it. He will know the ins and outs of the tool (like my photoshop comparison earlier) and can whip up pretty unique but "gets the job done" website on the cheap with the tooling that provides a huge amount of short cuts. Basically these tools allow beginner / non-super technical designers or web devs to short cut most of the coding, as I said before. Someone like Elementor, probably the biggest company in the space, is used by a huge number of people and businesses big and small.

On the hosting front, there are a lot of good and cheap hosting options these days. Self hosting is so much better than its ever been as PHP security and in general VPS security is a lot better that it was in the past. I don't want to recommend someone specific for paid for hosting because we may have contracts with hosting partners and like the previous post these opinions are my own and I like to keep my HN posting separate from my business but I'm more than happy to talk about that via email as well. Wowzers that was a run on sentence. Hope this helps!

Vanilla WP is excellent for beginners who aren't trying to do anything fancy, in fact I think its one of the best things to ever happen to the web. Yes there are exploits etc but that comes with all software. But most other software doesn't run something like 30-40% of the web though so their bugs are really magnified. Same goes for the WP plugin theme builders I mentioned above.

This is a really weird offering from Automattic and IMO the price is pretty insane. I would love for Automattic to actually focus on Gutenberg/Wordpress and get it in a decent state for development. They're at major version 16 and continue to push breaking changes to peoples page layouts. They've made countless decisions that just plan don't make sense. Until the past year I'd consider Gutenberg an abject failure; now, it is at least usable. There's a good reason its had a 1 star rating on the Plugin marketplace until a few months ago. It still doesn't have 5% of the feature set of something like Divi, Elementor, Avada, Salient or any of the other big names in WP themes/website builders. Elementor is so massive people sell themes built for it! I think it is incredible what Matt has accomplished with WP and his vision is admirable but I think its time for him to step aside and let Automattic find someone else to lead and refocus on their core product.