It’s never possible to do anything with it easily. It’s nothing but trial and error, looking up random guides, and praying for the best. There’s no logic. There’s no intuition. It really feels like the morons who put it together were just acting without thinking. They had no concept of an end-user trying to make use, or god forbid sense, of this convoluted shitstack.
Perhaps WASM really is the future. Maybe one day we will only have stories to tell young devs around campfires about how awful their ancestors had it.
My experience seems to be the opposite from yours. On every point you listed.
CSS has certainly grown into something with a historic legacy and backwards compatibility and stability directly contributes to a more mixed implementation than clean, streamlined and clear approach, but that’s a consequence of combining evolution and backwards compatibility.
I haven’t seen a better alternative yet, for web or other UI development approaches.
I like CSS quite a lot. Even if not all of it.