I expected this to be about consequences of enshittification, where interfaces and design have been run the fuck over by a constant mindless demand to feed Engagemagog. Hard to justify elegant design or retain worthwhile front-end developers when you're just telling them to shovel popups and flyovers into victims' eyeballs.
Instead it's a CSS guy blithely complaining about CSS's reputation.
I notice CSS is widely considered some or all of the following: unmaintainable; subjective; messy; unruly; unpredictable; a footgun; overly complicated; unscalable; and a nightmare.
Well yes, but have you seen how people describe Javascript?
But despite all these claims, CSS is also somehow “not a real programming language.”
It literally isn't. "Same with HTML." Markup is not programming, even if it is code. If it's Turing-complete then that's probably a bug. If you want to get clever with a twee definition based on how a programme is just an agenda for the machine, we have a word for that kind of not-an-excutable table-of-contents coding: it's called markup.
It’s like CSS exists in some bizarre quantum state; somehow both too complex to use, yet too simple to take seriously, all at once.
Being a pain in the ass is not a contradiction.
(Really; you’d probably be astounded how many ways there are to utterly destroy anything on the web with hardly any CSS.)
... why would people be surprised by that, given CSS's reputation? Everyone's dorked with F12 and gone 'now why's it done that?' thanks to instant visual feedback. Hence the reputation.
We might not ever say it, or even think it, but when we cast some people as heroes, we relegate others to the role of the sidekick—even though their labor is no less important, and they do at least as much to push the work toward success.
Your job is literally optional. Sites without CSS are not pretty, but pretty is a want, not a need. The people who make the content of the website are usually capable of half-assing a modicum of presentation... writers moreso than programmers, because engineer art is very not good. We'll figure out that spinner while the video loads, but it'll be purple and orange. If we didn't, though - the video still loads. The blog is still in English. The shopping cart still appears, even if the table is 4000px wide with ridge borders straight out of Netscape.
The idea that other engineers are smart—even smarter than we are—is the kind of stereotype that feels so common and true it’s rarely even questioned.
Now - essentialism is even worse than the author makes out here. Judging a person based on the relative importance of their work is close to bigotry. You don't have to be smart to do Javascript instead of CSS. (Arguably that choice says the opposite.) But we are still comparing the part of the site that does all the stuff, and making that part look nice.
“Here; other people already made this.” (i.e., they already did the real work.) “Now we just need you to fix it up.”
I wish technical debt only happened to markup people.