themes VS _s

According to the maintainer of that, as you can see in the Q&A section on that page, they use a theme called "Varia" from WordPress's github as their starting point: https://github.com/Automattic/themes/tree/trunk/varia

While I endorse any minimalistic block based approach, I don't think blockbase is nothing more than a bare bones as well. What bugged me the most in _s also bugs me in Blockbase - it has "too little of everyhing", it's less than minimum. It's better than "too much of everything" (which is the biggest issue with most of the WP themes out there) but it doesn't help. Also, in my personal opinion stey they still lack in SCSS quality-wise. While there's not a lots of code it's still too messy and complicated for my preferences. As a full on CSS guy with the most minimal approach I appreciate functional, fast yet working style sheet. You can see what I mean when you compare the button block in blockbase (here) and in Air-light (here).

If you want to tinker with the new stuff then check out Blockbase. It's basically the FSE centric replacement for the old underscores theme. Setup a local WP environment (e.g. DevKinsta or localwp) and clone the GH theme folder into your project.

I tried a lot of themes, in my experience GeneratePress is the fastest, unless you decide to go fully custom and go with _s (but it will be a lot of dev work).

If you've got dev chops in PHP, then Underscores is a good "starter" theme to build your theme off. It looks after a lot of the WP related stuff, letting you focus on the template/HTML/JS/CSS stuff.

Just to add since your new to WordPress and want to save a bunch of time you can use this springboard of a theme that's designed to be turned into what you want and saves hours of time. Underscores

Underscores is likely your best bet.

I would say underscores. I believe it’s by the Automattic team https://underscores.me

I used PHP, JavaScript, and a little bit of Python. I think themes are pretty easy you should try out _s which is a theme template for WordPress and there are similar things for plugins. I learned from this youtube series which is really good -> Wordpress Plugin Developement.

Underscrores or GeneratePress.

I ended up adopting an ITCSS inspired approach as a result of developing wordpress themes with underscores. You can see the current scss structure for starting a project with underscores here.