(Note: I am not in any way affiliated with any of the mentioned companies/products.)
After trying out different themes and block plugins I decided to go with the free version of Kadence Theme and Kadence Blocks. GeneratePress and GenerateBlocks also seemed interesting due to their minimalism and speed but in the end I think that Kadence makes the site quicker to build while making it just as lightweight as GP and GB.
Other options that I considered were Stackable and Spectra One.
Stackable is comparable to Kadence and I like that they have a nice collection of wireframes.
Spectra is also a solid choice but it is buggy when choosing colors (at least on my hosting). Also, although it has animations these can't be finely tuned.
Both Spectra and Stackable have content and post timeline which might be a nice feature to have.
What I liked about Kadence is that right out of the box it has a lot of prebuild blocks including:
- sticky header and footer
- transparent menu
- carousel
- gallery with masonry layout
- parallax, fixed and scroll settings for row blocks
All the blocks can be really finely tuned in the right pane. Another good thing is that the blocks that appear in the left pane can be controlled so that only the blocks that are actually being used are shown. This declutters the workflow.
The only thing that was missing in the free version of Kadence Blocks are animations and for this I decided to use Otter blocks which offer a lot of customization.
Since I don't want to use a lot of plugins I'll try to stick with these two for designing while probably later adding ACF for functionality and Rank Math or similar for SEO.
Considering page builders, I find Greenshift to be very promising though it would be unnecessarily complex for my needs.