We usually think about CSS at the end of our project. That's why we are pretty lousy at it. Learn CSS and you will find it to be a fun tool to play with.

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CSS gets a bad reputation not because it's inherently flawed, but because developers rarely invest time to properly learn it. While backend developers spend years mastering their craft, CSS is often treated as an afterthought—learned and applied simultaneously under time pressure. This leads to googling solutions, using hacks, and creating unmaintainable code with excessive `!important` declarations and absolute positioning. Like any skill, CSS requires dedicated study and practice to understand its behavior and use it effectively. The solution isn't more frameworks, but taking time to learn CSS through structured courses with experienced instructors.

CSS sucks because we don't bother learning it.

In a world where you must be full stack &amp; in the same time QA &amp; DevOps learning CSS which is more complex than entire back-end is luxury no one is able to afford
I tried, 15y ago it was possible. But bit by bit it turned into more and more complex thing. Since rise of flex box, grid, media queries, variables, now functions aka mix-ins and gods knows what else I can’t remember everything.

For me this entire post is funny because as a person who learned CSS before they learned programming, CSS to me feels like second nature.
However i can understand why people are so confused about it, its basically something completely different compared to programming languages.
But in the same way one could be a good programmer and still be utterly confused about other things like very generic typescript types, SQL, pulumi/terraform, cloud (aws and so on), github actions and many more things.
The problem in the end is motivation to learn. I love CSS and for me it is easy, but i dont love SQL in the same way and therefore its harder for me to learn.

Many underestimate CSS; that’s the whole point.
Lots of folks says: &quot;It’s not “programming,” “it’s just styles,” and all that nonsense. Most people, as the post rightly points out, don’t even realize the massive evolution of the language in recent years.
Although I’ve been doing this for over 20 years, I learn something new every day. It’s true there are dozens of units, dozens of sometimes confusing attributes, color spaces, variables, dozens of ways to do the same thing, the waterfall model, etc… so what? What language doesn’t have some of this, it’s own quirks and complexities? It doesn’t mean you have to “memorize” or “use everything”, there just options. It’s strength also lies in this complexity. The waterfall model is a feature, not a bug.
CSS is capable of incredible things today (along with improvements in native HTML and browser APIs) that were unthinkable when I started.
But these days nobody wants to learn it, and honestly, I hate frameworks like Tailwind (and I don’t care if you love it, it’s just my opinion, it’s garbage), but I understand its usefulness if you’re working on a quick project, don’t want to learn this and such… Now, reducing CSS to what a framework can do is losing 75% of what CSS is capable of.
My advice, as a pillar of web development, is to learn vanilla CSS, invest time (yes, it’s an investment, not a waste), and you’ll create faster, less JavaScript-dependent, and more robust websites.
Cheers !

And no one bothers learning it because it suck!
Every property has it’s own sets of rules that you have to memorize and remember when writing more CSS for other things to avoid having one affecting the defaults of the other.
How many properties and options can a human being doing full-stack remember and master for a sustained period of time?
That’s why things like unocss and tailwind end up existing. Imagine the base tool being so convoluted people prefer to download a JS tool and go through the terrible experience of setting one more package up just to avoid using it raw?

I have observed a common pattern where developers learn only the basics of CSS such as flexbox, grid, and core syntax and assume that this foundation is sufficient to handle any design task. It’s funny. In an era driven by AI and the pursuit of efficiency, there is often a preference for quick solutions, which has contributed to the rise of CSS frameworks designed to simplify and speed up development.
While these frameworks can accelerate workflow, they often do little to strengthen a developer’s fundamental understanding of CSS. This can lead to a fragile knowledge base, making debugging and maintaining custom styles increasingly difficult and time-consuming sometimes akin to a nightmare.
At the same time, CSS3 now offers a wide range of powerful features that enable cleaner, more maintainable, and more efficient styling. For instance, conditional CSS rendering and other modern capabilities allow us to achieve dynamic behaviors that previously required JavaScript. By embracing these native features, we can write more semantic, scalable code and reduce unnecessary JavaScript dependencies.
Ultimately, investing time in mastering CSS not just its basics, but its full, evolving potential is what empowers developers to build robust, sustainable, and creative user interfaces.