Waaay complicated - coming from Dreamweaver 2015

I could make a basic website with the old, 2015 Dreamweaver, aligning text to center, selecting the medium/large/x-large font, create tables, etc.

By @Crunchyhippo

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Old school web practices that nobody uses anymore.

<center> tag is no longer supported.

https://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_center.ASP

Medium, Large, X-Large HTML fonts were replaced with CSS font-sizes (px, em, rem, % or viewport units).

https://www.w3schools.com/css/css_font_size.asp

Tables are never used, except for tabular data (spreadsheets).  Today's layouts are built with semantic HTML tags, styled with CSS. See screenshot.

In all honesty, not much has really changed, functionally, between CC2015 and the latest version. There were massive growing pains when they first added the Live View Editor, and replaced the Code View engine with Brackets, but most of the issues were worked out over the years between then and now.

I wonder if your difficulties stem from attempting to use the "new" Live View Editor (massive difference between versions) as if it were Design View (nearly identical)?

Making sure there's a check by Window > Toolbars > Document will give you the ability to switch between Design View and the Live View Editors. The former should be very, very familiar as Adobe has done next to nothing with it in at least 15 years.

If that doesn't get you back on track, maybe if we knew more about your workflow, we could help you with specific issues and get you up and running.

You could use VSCode with GitHub Copilot, all free of charge.

I decide to publish a video where I have used Wappler to create a ToDo App using GitHub Copilot. Please have a look:

https://youtu.be/TF2OP509pEI?si=pfKGCRGTZQ6AFrOw

Even if you buy a book it will be an antiquated one. DW hasn't been updated in a couple years and is only in minimal maintenance status at this point receiving critical updates only. 

If you are not a coder and don't wish to be, you may be better looking to hosted solutions whether that is a hosted wordpress, webflow, wix, squarespace, etc. Then you install themes and get visual editors to help guide you in the site development. The other end of the spectrum are your code editors that focus on development cycles, git repos, and complex coding.