The brutal truth, we have also been using Magento since the earliest 1.x versions, in those days things were simpler, you could go to Themeforest and download any of hundreds of themes and they would just work, you could create direct load code via "Mage_Catalog_Model_Product_Api" methods making maintenance, enhancements, bug fixes a breeze, sure there were problems such as the indexes when you had large datasets of 10,000s and 100,000s products, but as long as you set the update on save it would work fine.
We went to our partner consultants and asked them to upgrade the architecture 2.x because the retailers we work with wanted a more "2022" look and feel, the consultants were not happy but started the conversion process, what should have been 6wks is now 6mths, they first updated the auto load code to use GraphQL to match the product manager, after finding the Magento internal code, for example when you did a product list search, would return 95% of the products, they had to built the search themselves to guarantee a complete result set, found this in other areas, gave up and wrote the entire GraphQL code themselves.
Even then the install was less than optimal, firstly to keep it simple 2.3x was installed but there were problems with the chosen theme among others, so reinstalled to 2.4x however you have to install Elasticsearch hence they had to upgrade the cluster architecture, which threw these odd errors, so they revised it to another cluster approach which is the one everyone else uses, but there is a problem. That approach works for redundancy, but negatively impacts Google ranking so back and forth making adjustments with rare random errors which were impossible to debug, until they worked out there is a problem with the way Magento 2.x and specifically 2.4x returns the page.
Those very infrequent errors were fixed the past week and suddenly this week 1,000 extra pages were ranked by Google on the web cluster, taking it up to 15% of the product dataset for that site, yes Google truly is that fickle and Magento even more. Then of course Magento removed the database read/write functionality so they had to come up with a way to point the cluster instances to the correct Galera cluster instance to load balance, which should be near impossible but they did. Then they had to throw away the GraphQL code as making adjustments was a nightmare, having to recompile the modules on every schema change and refresh the static content, which is painful with 10,000s products and just reverted to ObjectManager as per the 1.x code, it's fast, it's stable, it works.
Magento 1.x was always complicated, 2.x along with Adobe is enterprise level but not, think along the lines they are trying to compete with Hybris, Demandware, Websphere without the integration nor coding basis. Our consultants come from true enterprise backgrounds and 'uplifted' Magento to Hybris/Demandware/Websphere levels by adding areas such as Graphical Product Manager, complete auto product load which is more complex than you could imagine due to the auto cleaning required of the datasets, dynamic cross-country pricing with realtime shipping, discount, profit margin, currency calculations based on visitor location, not what you load in to Magento, and so on.
The simple answer is, if you can move towards enterprise level use of Magento you will be fine, if you try and use Magento 2.4x for small stores you will work longer hours, for less, because everyone from the core code base to extensions to themes have made everything many times more complex the past years, because that is how it is these days. If you are a store owner, if you can get Magento running, and more importantly keep it stable, ideally while using/changing/installing as little as possible, you will also gain, but the barrier to entry meaning time and expense is many times higher today, at the lower to mid range level, there will be a lot more failures than successes which explains "Lots of people I know are moving away from Magento.".
MochiGroup.net
