is float:clear still a thing? I remember being a thing 15-20 years ago? I can't remember needing it in the last 10+
white-space seems pretty straight forward: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/white-space
vertical-align, yea, alignment in general is hard and IMO it's hard because it's a hard topic in general, CSS or native. but yea, it's not "vertical-align"
> pretty straight forward
Anything but. It combines whitespace collapsing and text wrapping in one property and makes a mess of both.
See https://drafts.csswg.org/css-text-3/#white-space-property to get an idea of how complicated it is.
The MDN article is self-contradictory, e.g. note how the example don't match the "syntax" section.
Plus, it has inconsistent quirks with HTML textarea.