This is a masterclass from Dave:
After you hit the wall of unremovable complexity, any “advances” are a shell game, making tradeoffs that get passed down to the user … you get “advances” by shifting where the complexity lives.
You don’t get free reductions in complexity. In CSS land, you don’t get to pick some styling strategy and have all your troubles go away. This is plenty of nuance here, but largely whatever technologies you pick, you’re just placing the complexity in different buckets.
The best we can hope for is picking buckets that feel the most comfortable and productive for us and our teams.