Comment by ido
16 hours ago
“I don't have any illusions about it being better than plain CSS in any way other than it saving some time and brain cycles here and there.”
Not contradicting you- just wanted to highlight this is a major benefit: when I have to do styling, saving me effort, time and “brain cycles” and just getting it out of the way so I can focus on “business logic” instead is almost the most important aspect (as long as the result isn’t terrible).
Maybe there are use cases where performance of web-styling is critical, but it certainly isn’t in mine.
Totally, that's a good point. The trade-off makes sense for heaps of people's needs. It's a big part of why it's so successful in my opinion.
Plain old CSS will let you create optimal styling solutions for HTML documents, which is nice, but... How often is that actually necessary or even tangible for any end-user experience?
Anyone who needs better solutions is likely working in some scenario, on some team, where the problem of slow style recalculations or excessive payload sizes could be identified and resolved easily enough anyway. It's a trade-off, but the escape hatch is a few steps away.