Reconsider _s as a theme base

[zzap]

Feature Request

Development of _s is on hold in favor of new theme (based on _s), Varia. The future of Underscores is not clear yet but apparently development will continue at some point, when is also not clear (as seen in this comment: Automattic/_s#1369 (comment)).

It's not just development that has stopped, it's maintenance too, so we have many small things missing, such as wp_body_open hook etc.

Is there any other resource that can be used as a base theme for scaffold command?

[swissspidy]

We should probably just deprecate this command in favor of something that creates a block theme, probably some @WordPress/... npm package or so.

[ernilambar]

I would prefer not to depend upon some external package again. We can create our own minimal FSE theme with basic files only like index.html, style.css and theme.json.

Command could be wp scaffold fse or something.

[swissspidy]

What I meant with my above comment is that Gutenberg could build a new package @wordpress/create-block-theme or something that does this. I think that would be a better home than WP-CLI as they can more actively maintain it.

There is also https://wordpress.org/plugins/create-block-theme/.