Theme Style Variations: Changing style variations, or choosing a new color preset, clears user created custom colors

[ndiego]

Description

If you have created custom colors in the Styles panel, as soon as you select a different style variation, or select a color preset, the custom colors are removed. This behavior is the same in 6.5 and with Gutenberg. See the videos below for comparison.

It is not clear to me why user created custom colors should be tied to the style variation that has been chosen. While there may be a technical reason, this is not intuitive. Furthermore, since Gutenberg (and soon 6.6) adds color presets to the Style panel, it is very easy to click on a preset and then accidentally wipe all your custom colors. If a user doesn't know that they can click undo, there is no way to get their colors back outside of refreshing the Site Editor without saving.

Step-by-step reproduction instructions

1. Using TT4 and Gutenberg, open the Styles panel in the Site Editor and add a few custom colors
2. Select a color preset and see that the custom colors are removed

Screenshots, screen recording, code snippet

WordPress 6.5

custom-colors-6-5.mp4

WordPress 6.5 + Gutenberg

custom-colors-6-5-gutenberg.mp4

Environment info

• WordPress 6.5
• Gutenberg lastest

Please confirm that you have searched existing issues in the repo.

Yes

Please confirm that you have tested with all plugins deactivated except Gutenberg.

Yes

[mgawe]

Related: #48407

[richtabor]

It does feel strange that a user's custom color would be discarded. We treat them separately in the UI, feels they should be resolved separately as well.

[scruffian]

I think this is part of the change proposed in #62661. This is not a small fix, so I'll move it off the 6.6 board.