My mum, my step-dad, my brother and his fiancee, my next door neighbours, my best friend and my worst enemy all have this in common: they go to a website and they want to see the content on the page. They don't care why or how, so they're never going to apply an optional CSS file, even in the unlikely event they understand what it is.

Sorry, that's not meant to come off as a brutal put-down: it's just the way most people are about the web.

Regular users don't optimize their work environment strongly, but that doesn't mean they don't care. And current situation is that full power over site layout is in hands of site designers. I believe this is a bad balance, and needs to be strongly shifted towards good and easily configurable defaults client-side. That is, I believe the situation will improve meaningfully for regular users if we could seriously dumb down HTML5/CSS - while responsible creatives will be saddened, the reality proves that the commercial web in general can not be trusted with so much power over layout.

That's not a reality, though, that's an opinion. If we were to "dumb down" HTML5/CSS and remove degrees of creative freedom from authors in favor of centralized, client-side solutions, we would do so for everyone, not just the "commercial web."

A web where everything looks and behaves exactly the same is a web which is only interesting to a minority of people. That web would probably have never escaped academia and the world would be worse off for it.

(Which makes the "web where everything looks and behaves exactly the same" better than the web where designers fuck with UX to get a fraction of a percent increase on an A/B test, because consistent interfaces are easier on the mind of the user.)

They do care. They just don't know better, and even for us power users content wins over the container. But everybody is complaining about slow websites that don't ever load, and this is leading more and more to the flocking away from the web to the apps. IDK if this is a good thing or not, but sometimes I think that if web became again a web of documents and applications again applications (albeit castrated tbh), that's at least better than what we have ATM.