Michael Martinez 👑
Okay, Treen shared the correct site with me. It's got some issues.
I make no judgment about the quality of WP Bakery as a development platform. Each of us plays to our strengths and we all have biases and preferences. So there's more than one way to cook this meal, as they say.
Would changing themes help? Sure. Most likely. But that's a lot of work, in my opinion.
Before changing themes I would first run the site through Google's PageSpeed Insights tool. Link provided below. Now, the report lists a lot of things and if you're not a coder you may not make much sense of what it says.
But as I mentioned with respect to your personal site, your employer's site has a huge number of resources (Javascript, CSS, and a few other things).
The site has one overly large image file (the PNG). PNG files are unnecessarily huge and replacing that with a JPG will help.
There are plugins that combine Javascript into 1 file. You'll eliminate up to 100 resource calls by doing that alone. And there are plugins that do the same thing for CSS. Some plugins do both Javascript and CSS. Just reducing the number of resource calls should speed up the site a fair bit.
It may not be enough. There are other issues that switching themes may eliminate. Some of the issues are systemic (baked into WordPress itself).
Some issues are created by 3rd-party resources, like the use of ReCaptcha. Changing themes won't fix these issues.
As a rule of thumb, the more complicated and visual a page layout is, the more likely it will have speed and performance issues. Good developers can optimize many of these issues, but they can only do so much. The bottom line is that the more you ask a Web page to do in terms of presentation and facilitating user engagement, the more difficult it becomes to make the page fast. It's an uphill climb, although it's not necessarily a Sysiphean task.
Hope that helps. Whether the theme should be replaced is a business decision, in my opinion. But probably it comes down to which is the more expensive option (in both time and money) and what it will take to maintain the visual experience the site is trying to achieve.
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

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Mihir N. Mirani
I wouldn't go with this guy. There are better options (oxygen builder, rank math, etc.) than Elementor pro & SEO framework if you really want to improve the website.
You can go ahead if he's okay with payment after results.
If your niche isn't very competitive, lot can be achieved by optimizing current website as well.

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Buth
As I know the first versions of Bridge only supported WPBakery. There are many custom shortcodes in Bridge that were designed to be used with WPBakery as a result.
It is possible to change theme but the theme has minimal redirects, uses minified CSS, Javascript and HTML and prioritizes visible content well. Its page load speed is impressive when you consider all of its functionality. The theme is compatible with SEOPressor Connect, Yoast and RankMath. There is one problem of using this theme, Bridge can be challenging to set up for beginners as the theme has a massive number of options.
"these slow your website down which in turn damages your Search Engine Optimization (SEO)" It means they want to get a big budget instead of optimizing your site. As a WordPress developer I prefer to use our custom theme, and it doesn't mean that I would recommend changing theme. I didn't review the site, but the image optimization is enough in many cases.
Also the speed of a website is overrated. It is a minor ranking factor. A competitive industry means you should focus on the marketing strategy and content.

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Truslow
I'd like to point out that WPBakery or any other page builder aren't really a problem on their own. It's in knowing how to use them. I worked on a site a few years back where I took my first look and cringed when I saw all the WPBakery classes in the code and I instinctively cringed. Then I looked at the code itself and realized that there was really nothing all that bad (SEO-wise) in the code.
The person who built the site with WPBakery was an expert at using WPBakery and did the right things with it. The problem comes down to the fact that if you want to change someone, you need to find a specialist who is just as skilled at WPBakery as the original person was. (WPBakery is typically considered the worst – not because it's actually the worst, but it's the one that allows you to do things poorly most easily. You don't HAVE to do them poorly, but it's easy to do it that way. And, IMO, if you have the skillset to use it properly, you don't have far to go to have the skillset to do it without using it at all).
The team you have looking at it has their team (seemingly) skilled at using Elementor, instead. While Elementor doesn't make it as easy to make poor choices that can negatively affect things, you can still do things poorly – and to fix them, again, you need someone skilled at Elementor.
Even Elementor can make crap code in unskilled hands. We had a site we looked at the other day that had some code that looked (basically) like this:
<section>
<h2>Here was the heading</h2>
</section>
<section>
<p>Here is the copy that supposedly goes with the heading above, but the section tags here send a signal that this is actually part of a different section and not related to the heading above at all</p>
</section>
Clean code. Check. Good code? No check.
Now… here's the trick.
If this team now does a great job of converting the WPBakery garbage code into decent Elementor code, then you're ahead. But then next year when you want to add something new or redesign something, you'll need to make sure to keep using them OR make sure the next design team is skilled in using the same tools. If not, they're going to want another new rebuild. It won't necessarily be because the code is bad, but because they're skilled with another tool and to get the same results you had with the old team, they'll want to be working with their own tool of choice.
This is why I, personally, prefer to just stay away from page builders altogether. Most of our sites still default to the Classic Editor but we have it set to allow switching some pages over to Gutenberg if you wish to do some design stuff on the page that doesn't look and work exactly like the standard setup. For blog posts, there's no need to get fancy and make sure the people you have posting content use this specific block here and this specific block there and so on. They come in, paste directly from a Word Document (which isn't as much a nightmare these days as it used to be), right or left align a few images, slap in a few Call-To-Action (CTA) shortcodes in the right place and the post is done.
All the alignment and styling is done when I build the site and when you put in good clean HTML code it just sort of automatically looks good – using proper web standards, no extraneous six lines of code just for an h2 tag, and no muss, no fuss. And then – since it's clean standard HTML code – when you do a redesign, you can apply just about any theme you want and it'll snap into place and look halfway decent right out of the box. Sure, you'll want to redefine a few CSS tags, but… no need to go through every page and make tweaks. And if you hire someone else to help next year, you're handing them a site built to official HTML and WordPress standards, not one built to the standards of a specialized tool.
Another drawback of the page builders (and the "I can do ANYTHING!" themes like Divi and Avada and that lot) is that they do try to do everything. In reality, though, you are only going to use a couple of those things. So now you have to make sure you turn off all the crap you don't need (which isn't always 100% possible), and even then it's likely loading page after page of extra CSS you're never going to use.
For me, a good clean theme with proper semantic markup and labeling is the way to go. Need a specific feature – grab a plugin that does that specific job. (Many of those themes and some of the builders are probably bundling that same plugin in them anyway – which means that if security issues come up, you need to wait for that plugin developer to update and patch, then wait again for the theme or page builder developer to patch it, and then finally get it on your site).
So again… the point here is that it's not REALLY the page builder (WPBakery or otherwise) that is the problem. The problem is that those tools need to be used by someone who is skilled at using them. When our team gets a job with a site that uses one of those and there's a lot of cleanup to do… we tend to give the client a few options.
1) We put something together that looks very much like the proposal you have – but one that doesn't bash or make your previous design team or the tools they use look bad. There's no good in making a client feel like they got ripped off. They may have made an uninformed choice and it's going to cost them a bit, but it's not nearly as bad as an outline like the one in the OP here makes it look. And, our plan wouldn't be to switch to another page builder, it would be to switch to pure WordPress (with only necessary specific plugins to get the function and effect we need) and proper standards.
2) We offer to let them keep the page builder plugin and we'll simply find and subcontract someone who is an expert at using whatever builder it happens to be and we can rebuild that way. The downside to this plan is that it ends up costing just as much as plan one. First you have the extra person involved. And then, fixing bad code from page builders whether you're using the same builder, a different one, or just going old school and using the tools that came with WordPress, all take the same amount of time. So while this costs the same, you still end up in the same position in 5 years when it's time for the next site refresh. The team is going to come in and want so do it over from scratch rather than just reskinning with a new theme and having 80% of the site just look good and work right out of the box.
IMO, the proposal you have there is typical, reasonable, and not really a bad way to go (if they deliver the things promised, anyway). It may not be the absolute BEST way to go, and it's not the way I would go, but it appears to be a reasonable plan. I use the "built on a solid foundation" term in almost every proposal I've written.
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