Many developers use CSS frameworks to reduce boilerplate, increase quality, and drive consistency. This sounds good in theory but often fails in practice. Write custom CSS instead.

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CSS frameworks offer short-term gains but become hard to maintain over time. Developers often have to override the framework, which leads to a custom framework that is difficult to maintain. CSS frameworks are hard to enforce consistency with and often deviate from an application's design needs. It is recommended to write custom CSS using modern CSS features for better maintainability and flexibility.

You Don’t Need a CSS Framework

I’ve also been leaning more towards using my own CSS rather than using other methods; having used tailwind for a while, I’ve been finding that it just cluttered up my code.
I’m not sure if I agree with ditching things like SCSS though, although I’ve only just picked it up and it seems to me like it adds some nice features that CSS doesn’t quite have yet. Although a lot of my preference might just come from the syntax.

I’ve been using SCSS for years and I have to say that modern CSS makes it redundant. Maybe because I rarely needed custom functions or mixins
about “Hard to Enforce Consistency” I also have my doubts about how not using a framework will enforce consistency.
today’s frameworks like Tailwind or Panda CSS provide ways to create your own design system. they also provide ways to enforce consistency (e.g. allowing using only defined tokens). For me Panda is the winner (even though is CSSinJS and requires a compile step)
Material UI and Boostrap are not frameworks IMHO, they are UI libraries with predefined styles hard to customize.

Very good content, I agree with practically everything.
I leave a note regarding SCSS. It still has its uses like @use, @mixins for example. But I also see that many developers get carried away with this and end up creating extremely complex and difficult to maintain functions. Using SCSS in a basic way still has its value.

I’ve always been a fan of writing CSS since you don’t have that much freedom when it comes to CSS frameworks, it’s gonna get to a point where bootstrap HTML classes are gonna get longer than java class names lol