CSS is a programming language because that’s what you’re doing when you write it; you’re programming the application’s presentation logic.
It's as if he wants to get into a philosophical debate about what programming languages are.
Frontend is hard and it's made unnecessarily hard by HTML,CSS, and Javascript. I swore off of frontend due to the evergrowing, unnecessary complications.
What I'm looking forward to is web apps written in a single programming language with no javascript knowledge necessary at all. There are rust frameworks that generate the JS boilerplat to load WASM. Some use the DOM to make their UIs, some insert a canvas and use WebGL, some generate HTML in the backend and replace parts of the live frontend with that, but my favorite is when there's no HTML, CSS or JS in sight.
As for the devaluation of frontend, I always found it weird that frontend devs were paid less than backend devs. I respect frontend devs for being able to do what I can't. We're in this together. Pay us all a good wage. We're workers and have to stick together.