I is certainly true for me that I didn't take the time to learn the intricacies of CSS behavior and I still think the cascading properties are the worst feature, namely concepts like specificity. It is hard to keep a mental model of styling rules and at some point it is just degrades to trial and error.
Nobody came up with a better alternative though (apart from the many dialects that transpile to CSS again).
In 2025 when starting from scratch all you really need is flexbox, css grid, and the box model and that will get you like 99% of the way on most layouts.
Specificity is really just
* ids take priority * the highest number of specified classes, and if there’s a tie it’s the first one specified * the highest number of types
The only problem is that most paths in frontend development say “slap a class on an element” and call it a day but you do need to be intentional about it and only specify what you need
What about CSS layers[0] doesn't solve your specificity issues?
[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@layer