I want there to be a right answer to this question, but I don't know what it is. Hopefully someone else will reply.
If you want an answer guaranteed to be correct
for you, it might be better if you could specify a little bit more about the target parameters of what kind of map you want to make, and which game version you intend to play it on. Many people play on the latest version, but I have heard some eerie reports about issues with more complex maps crashing hopelessly after the August 17th, 2022 patch that changed a bunch of stuff under the hood.
And Activision only really seems interested in minimum stability with the World Editor anymore, such that it appears to open and function from the standpoint of a basic user that uses it for 5 minutes, but not that it necessarily is as fully functional as it once was in complex custom situations that are rough around the edges. I could be wrong; maybe they have fixed the stability issues in the patches the last few months. But watching them push Patch 1.33 into production and overwrite the older version on August 17th, 2022 even though we knew it was busted since early 2022 in the PTR was difficult for me because it showed that they are happy to ignore bug reports and steamroll a technology that works (replacing it with one that has new egregious bugs) to achieve whatever their agenda was.
So anyway from 2017 to about 2020 generally I was big into the idea that a person could just use whatever the latest map editor was, because it appeared to be incrementally growing better. But after 2020 I personally became more fringe and used a 2008 version of the editor alongside JNGP and an old version of the game for my fun, because I was in those cases just doing single player and mucking about in YouTube videos.
Certainly the 2020 Reforged World Editor aspired to open up all previous map versions and save them in its Reforged map format, and aspired to be fully compatible with everything which makes it a very viable and tempting option for someone who wants to make maps to socially play without concerning themselves about much technology history of the editor. But my impression was that it was a little less stable after August 17th, 2022 and only slowly regaining some of the more obscure features that got busted since then.
Other users might tell you that you should not use a World Editor at all and could make your maps using TypeScript to Lua or something, or maybe WurstScript, in both cases writing a bunch of code like a software professional using Visual Studio Code.
Who among us is wrong? At some point, if you can learn the history behind these different options and pick the one that fits your needs, then what you are doing will become what is right for you, I imagine.
Edit: possibly relevant video of me messing around that shows how i could use a World Editor and Game that are free software built from their source code (that I can change in any way I want or fix any bug I want!) instead of using Blizzard binaries:
(Note that this is a very technical thing to do and not something to recommend for casual users yet)
