I've been a CodePen user since the very early days. Have always loved the platform. I hate to be negative, but I'm honestly not a fan of the 2.0 release. What I loved about CodePen was just being able to try out something really quick and simple. But the new interface makes me feel more like I'm building a website inside of a website.

That's the hard part about tools like this. They're too simple to be used for anything important, and as soon as the creator follows that path you end up in a situation where it's too simple for anything complex and too complex for anything simple.

Amazing platforms like Glitch ran into this problem.

(Some did pull it off! Like how Vercel built a kingdom out of `now`.)

Solvable with reasonable defaults and putting most things behind an advanced section?

no, it's just not solvable... you can only mitigate

anything hosted free will inevitably be abused by scammers, you need constant vigilance just to stay a step ahead