> Web design really isn’t my strong suit [...] for probably like 12 years now [...] and am making no efforts to improve

Is this ignorance common among those for whom functional CSS makes sense, or are there any CSS experts who like it? I'm bewildered by the popularity, as I am by several other fashions.

Sometimes I wonder if these choices come from blog-driven development. I used to feel a bit insecure that I didn't go to school for computer science. I tried to make up for that by reading books, many books, cover to cover. Reading a great book cover to cover gives you a coherent understanding of the beginning, middle, and end of a language or tool. Also I read references: the list of core PHP functions, the jQuery API, and the list of CSS attributes. I didn't memorize them. I just tried to understand the gist of each, filed in the back of my mind, enough to prod me to find it in the reference when I needed it. But if you are learning by blog and Stack Overflow, do you ever come to an overall, comfortable understanding of something?

I grant you that it will take some time, but so does learning these frameworks. The frameworks seem to fix one problem while planting three more. And Julia Evans is a technically minded person. She has written about Git and the Linux command line. Which is more complicated, Linux or CSS? I had always thought that HTML and CSS were meant to be softballs, for people who are geeky but maybe not full-fledged programmers. HTML and CSS were the first languages I learned, but my coworker stressed to me that they weren't full-on programming languages.

> It’s 2018! All websites need to be responsive!

I wonder if responsiveness is another cause for this trend. I agree that making pages that shrink and fold for various screens might put some novices over the edge. But looking the simplicity of Julia's website, maybe all she needs is a viewport meta tag.

Another advantage I've had is my lifelong interest in graphic design. Before I knew CSS I knew about color, fonts, white space, etc. So I'm sure that made learning CSS easier for me. But for those who aren't into that, why aren't templates and stylesheets from other people enough? They've already chosen fonts and colors and margins and stuff that looks good together. They give classes for various kinds of pages and sections. Maybe you're somewhere in the middle, where you're not adept enough to write your whole CSS from scratch, but you want more customization than just using a general stylesheet. But why can't you tweak it? If you're smart enough to use Tailwind, aren't you smart enough to fiddle with some attributes in a stylesheet, make the corner rounder, make a font bigger, etc.?

I truly am interested in understanding, if possible. CSS has a few things that are mildly annoying, but just mildly. Nothing would ever make me want to do something like this. Truly I am bewildered!

One more thing: my attention is spread across many complex applications, thousands of lines of code, and I am in charge of the full stack (JavaScript, HTML, CSS, PHP, Apache, SQL). So it's not like I get to spend all my time focused on the front end. Yet my users have told me that my pages look nice. I'm spread thin, but I've never wanted to use anything but stylesheets, no BEM, no SASS, just good, old-fashioned selectors.