How awful are these new widgets that we would have to spend hours setting up where we used to do it in minutes?

Block widgets were a nightmare for my non-technical clients. This put everything back to basics (as does the Classic Editor plugin) and makes it so much easier for users that don't work above an intermediate technical level.

Are we going to have to stop calling it WordPress and start calling it BlockPress??? This plugin is indispensable to fix the monstrosity of the Block-based Widgets Editor in WordPress 5.8.

I could not figure out what happened to Widgets. Finally ran across a Youtube video for adding Custom Sidebars. While adding the Plugin and activating it, it mentioned that there was Standard Widget plugin to fix the WordPress update. Installed it and amazing all fixed. Honestly thought my site was corrupted and I had fix my database or to go to a backup copy. Lost days of work because of this. This kind of thing reduces my faith in using WordPress for my websites. Compatibilities issues and updates scare the hell out of me. Its like the Blue Screen of death with Windows. Then on top of this we have to worry about hackers, viruses and ransomware. Updates are a necessary evil. I get it! There has to be a protocol or procedure for preventing and communicating these problems.

Saved me a lot of frustration

wp 5.8 broke the widget ids that were being used. The widget instance id in the widgets page no longer matches what is in the widget settings in the db. The classic plugin fixes that.