We keep reinventing CSS, but styling was never the problem

Summary

We’ve been building for the web for decades. CSS has had time to grow up, and in many ways, it has. We’ve got scoped styles, design tokens, cascade layers, even utility-first frameworks that promise to eliminate bikeshedding entirely. And yet, somehow, every new project still begins with a shrug and the same old question: “So… how are we styling things this time?” It’s not that we lack options. It’s that every option comes with trade-offs. None of them quite fit. We keep reinventing CSS as if it’s the root cause. It isn’t. CSS Wasn’t Made for This It’s easy to forget what CSS was originally designed for: documents. You’d write some HTML, style a few headings and paragraphs, maybe float an image to the left, and call it a day. In that world, global styles made sense. The cascade was helpful. Inheritance was elegant. Fast-forward a couple of decades and we’re building highly interactive, component-based, state-driven, design-system-heavy applications, still with a language meant to style a résumé in the early 2000s. CSS wasn’t built for encapsulated components. It wasn’t built for dynamic theming or runtime configuration or hydration mismatches. So we’ve spent years bolting on strategies to make it work. Every Option Solves One Problem. None Solve All of Them. What we have now is a landscape of trade-offs. BEM gives you naming predictability, and very verbose selectors. CSS Modules give you scoping, unless you need runtime theming. Utility-first CSS (like Tailwind) enables fast iteration, but clutters your markup. CSS-in-JS offers colocation and flexibility, at the cost of runtime performance and complexity. Cascade Layers and :where() give you more control, if your team is ready to learn them. Each approach solves something. None solve everything. Yet we keep framing them as silver bullets, not as trade-off tools. Maybe It’s Not CSS That’s the Problem Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most of our styling pain doesn’t come from CSS itself. It comes from trying to shoeho...