CMB2 VS timber

So far in this current project, I added CMB2 as a composer dependency, and that's done just enough to take away the headache of adding custom metaboxes and input fields to different pages. I feel like maybe if I just get myself the most basic toolkit to handle these common tasks, and a boilerplate to start me off with some structure, I may be able to wrap my mind around the way WP expects things to be added and registered the more I work with it.

You might also check out CMB2, which is a bit more efficient query-wise with repeater fields than ACF Pro.

Use Timber for templating https://github.com/timber/timber

I’ve used timber and then built of their example theme. I can share a skeleton example of my base theme that incorporates vue and vite if you’re interested!

Would just drop underscore and go for https://github.com/timber/timber with their starter theme.

Finally, since Wordpress by default doesn't have a templating language you might be annoyed by mixing HTML/PHP for templates at first. I could recommend Timber to add Twig template support to your theme. It's helped me out a great deal in cleaning up messy intermixed presentation files.

Timber or Sage as you prefer !

ACF let you make all your custom fields and assign them literally anywhere. Timber brings Twig to Wordpress so you can have your views in twig files and your logic on php files and have a neat, modular, tidy, mantainable theme without having to deal with those mixed php/html nightmares you usually see.

Ya know, one more thing you might want to just look through: Timber/Timber.

Your best bet are starter themes using the Twig templating language which is similar to the templating languages you may already know.

Timber : https://timber.github.io/docs/