Removing PageBuilder from Magento 2.4.3 again

Huh, remove it?

Yes, remove it. While the fact that PageBuilder has come available to everyone (and even better: for absolutely zero dollars), not everyone needs PageBuilder. For instance, I'm running a small Magento 2 shop with a product collection under the 100. It is linked to a Slim PHP based site (this site), which is again driven by Markdown files and snippets and remote sources. But for all of that, I don't need a CMS. In other words, the CMS Pages and CMS Blocks that Magento offers by default are only used to a minimum. And PageBuilder is definitely not needed.

So why add it to that Magento shop?

Replacing the packages

For years now, I've been running various composer replacement packages. The Magento core is shipped as a single meta-package (for example, magento/product-community-edition) which again requires numerous other Magento modules. If a certain module is added to that meta-package, there is no easy composer remove to remove it again (because you can't remove the dependencies of your dependencies). However, there is the replace trick.

Besides replacing MSI, bundled extensions, core extensions, GraphQL, sample data and content staging, I'm happy to announce that there is now a new replacement package: yireo/magento2-replace-pagebuilder

Bye bye, PageBuilder

To install the packages, a simple command should suffice:

composer require yireo/magento2-replace-pagebuilder

Once completed, the PageBuilder packages should be gone. Note that the composer replace feature is undocumented and it requires a different mindset than when using require. Troubleshooting is therefore specific to this feature and documented here: yireo/magento2-replace-tools.

Disclaimer

I'm not against PageBuilder. I love it. And I think the fact that it is now available for everyone, is a huge boost for Magento. However, what can be added, can be removed (which almost sounds like a Matrix quote).