There’s now a robust fix for automatically reaching the Classic Editor, for users of free WordPress.com blogs.
This means that, for the time being at least, free blog users at WordPress.com don’t have to use the free offline-blogging software Open Live Writer. It was looking like that was going to be the only viable option, to avoid the horrible Block editor at WordPress.
The only element of the UI that you won’t be able to get via the older interface is the “Bell” alerts. Because the “Bell” sidebar (showing alerts from across your blogs) now no longer loads up in the older UI. To see these alerts you need to temporarily click into “My sites”, take a peek at the slide-out Bell sidebar there, then go back again.