> 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.