"Instead of hand-crafting an HTML template with <title> <p> <a> <h1> <img> <div> etc"
You forgot a whole lot of <table>, all the inline CSS and all the IE11 comment hacks. Oh, and also OfficeHTML or whatever abomination that is called, because Microsoft Word 2003 also remains alive inside Outlook.
Most people doing anything of medium complexity is already using some abstraction layer, such as MJML [1]. Also remember you gotta either test on multiple clients, or use something like Litmus.
Manual coding is getting very inefficient since it takes hours plus it requires a lot of testing (ie with litmus or emailonacid).
There are modern alternatives to manual coding both for developers (embeddable editors for SAAS) such as beefree, unlayer, chamaileon, stripo and for email designers like beefree, stensul, knak, stripo, taxiforemail...
To be fair I am using a very limited 'style' for all my emails and usually they just work. Everywhere
In my experience the more shiny the email is, the more logos and whatever components are around the actual content the less clicks I get. So i try to be just a branded level above a text email.
Yes, normally I'm a little adverse to abstractions over HTML, but HTML for email is so convoluted and non-standard that I think in this domain it makes a ton of sense. There may be a world of devs specialized in HTML that works in Outlook (bless you folks) but for this dev used to targeting the browser something like mjml is a lifesaver.
HTML is not designed to work over email and is not capable of describing an email thread, a conversation. Aside from that HTML over email is ridiculously trivial. Super trivial. It isn't the HTML that is challenging but the CSS over email that is challenging. It takes some practice to figure out, but if you are even remotely competent you DO NOT need table insanity. Tables are for tabular data only.
These are screenshots of actual emails I created back in 2006 for a company that no longer exists. It's a bit easier now than it was back then.
When you have absolute freedom to design the emails around the limitations, sure, that works and is certainly much better than the soup of tables and IE11/Office stuff.
However even with that you still gotta test on multiple clients.
If you want to use something like border-radius, for example, it won't work on some versions of Outlook, for example [1]. You either show a slightly different layout or you use workarounds. There are plenty of other examples like that.
I personally just use very simple emails, so it's <p> and <h1> etc. But other people have to work around those limitations, and not everyone is a developer with design knowledge that can tweak the design to a point where it is both simple and good looking.
You forgot a whole lot of <table>, all the inline CSS and all the IE11 comment hacks. Oh, and also OfficeHTML or whatever abomination that is called, because Microsoft Word 2003 also remains alive inside Outlook.
Most people doing anything of medium complexity is already using some abstraction layer, such as MJML [1]. Also remember you gotta either test on multiple clients, or use something like Litmus.
HTML emails are no fun.
[1] https://mjml.io/