There will always be better ways to do a thing. Does your area freeze? If so you would want to pour footings deeper than your ground freezes, as the frost will move the footings up and down and make your deck unlevel. Google "frost heave."

But, frost heave or not, you can get away with deck blocks if you're trying to go cheap and easy and accepting that the platform will end up moving.

And certainly if this deck is elevated you want to pay really good attention to beam spans and hardware and making sure you're not going to kill anyone.

But if you're putting down a platform on the ground for a few chairs and want to cut some corners, go ahead. There will always be people (on this forum) who will poke holes in your project and point out all the errors (and there will almost always be errors.) But there's also something to be said for learning by doing and not getting bogged down under the weight of perfection to the point that you never build anything.

You might find your deck spongy. Or unlevel. Or you might have to replace it in a few years with something better. But if you don't mind sacrificing a little time and money for the sake of learning some lessons, do it. Build some confidence and competence and make some mistakes to better learn what to do (and what not to do) next time.

It's easier to start putting together the pieces of how to do things the right way by doing, rather than learning just the theory.

My two cents. I sell build plans and have built a ton. I stand by the sentiment. Don't kill anyone. Do some research. But feel free to make some mistakes and learn by a little trial and error if you are willing to accept the consequences.

Correct about the 2x8 spans. Those are shit plans and there are a few things wrong. The most obvious being their materials list having errors.

But yes, they are using 2x8s and in theory those are supported by the rim joists and the span is allowable. They just have some extra supporting deck blocks in there for good measure.

But the way they have the joist hangers set up in there the joists are not actually being supported. I wouldn't follow those plans to the letter.

Anyway, if you're dead set on using 2x6s with questionable spans just use more deck blocks than you need and you don't have to overthink the framing so much.

What this person said. If you've got a deck block in the middle, you cut your span in half.