WordPress 5.8 introduces a new block-based widget editor to the Widgets screen (Appearance > Widgets) and Customizer (Appearance > Customize > Widgets). This new editor allows users to add blocks (instead of widgets) to widget areas using the familiar block editor interface introduced in WordPress 5.0.
To maintain the best site editing experience, the new widget screen has been disabled in the Genesis Framework.
If you are using WordPress 5.8+ and you’d like to enable the block-based widget editor for your Genesis Framework-powered site, you can add the following code to your child theme’s functions.php file: