All that complexity is a trap. It creates a need for people that have spent the unreasonable time to grasp a poor design, and then they have the secrets that others simply do not have the time to waste learning yet another poorly designed reindeer game. That complexity eats time, energy and is pointless. CSS is a shit show of poor design, poor documentation, and secrets.
What secrets are you talking about?
All the edge cases.
Do you have any concrete examples?
How's about the very existence of different layout engines, which can all be in-use at once on the same page?
So, what is your proposal?
Throw away the front-end of the Web and start over with a system actually designed to facilitate graphical applications instead of delivering styled documents.
HTTP can stay, and HTML/CSS can stay just like PDFs for delivering a document, but when it comes to UI components, we should be able to have things as fast and performant as e.g. RedLang / Processing / Enlightenment DR17 / etc without every developer having to shovel megabytes of shim-ware down to the client.
That's a good solution in a perfect world. But that's magical thinking. What's a real solution?
We have a plethora of native frameworks for building UI-s. Some of them are quite well designed. And yet the Web front-end has won against all the UI frameworks designed specifically to build UI-s.
That’s partly due to reach, though. The combination of the browser coupled with Electron eating away at those native UI layers means it unfortunately makes little sense to bother with alternatives, even if the alternatives are better.
I.e, the GP is trying to argue one thing and you’re kind of going down a different tangent.