Comparing speed, maintenance cost and editor experience honestly for each approach.
Page builders are frequently dismissed by developers and frequently loved by the people who actually maintain the site. Both positions are defensible, and the right answer depends on who will be editing it in two years.
What builders genuinely buy you
Non-technical staff can create and change pages without a developer, which is often the difference between a site that stays current and one that ossifies. For marketing sites with frequent campaign pages, that autonomy is worth real money.
What they cost
Builders ship a lot of generic markup, CSS and JavaScript to support every possible layout, which shows up in page speed. They also create lock-in: content saved as builder-specific shortcodes is painful to migrate later. Performance work has a lower ceiling than on a purpose-built theme.
The middle path
A lean custom theme with a small set of well-defined, editable blocks gives editors the freedom they need within a design that cannot be broken. It costs more to build than installing a builder and less to run than either extreme.
Decide by editing frequency. Rarely edited sites should be custom; heavily edited marketing sites need editor autonomy more than they need a perfect performance score.
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