Elementor 3.24.1 (August 2024): widespread reports of broken sites + entire designs lost in update

Claim: Elementor 3.24.1 (August 2024) shipped with breaking changes. WordPress.org support thread title and contents document widespread breakage:

"Elementor update broke my site and its entire design."

Source: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/elementor-update-broke-my-site-and-its-entire-design/

Confidence: Verified.

The recurring maintenance cost. Page builders are the largest single source of "site broke after update" incidents in the Candid maintenance retainer time budget. Every Elementor release is a potential outage for sites that haven't staged the update on a non-prod environment. Companion incident: Elementor 3.26 (late 2024): removed legacy Schemes API + enabled Element Caching by default — risky for shortcode-dependent themes — the late-2024 Schemes API removal broke shortcode-dependent themes.