I will swear on my life that I haven't used a style attribute in the last five years. Since I started using BEM for namespacing I have had a very easy time keeping my CSS clean and maintainable. I won't deny others their opinions, though.

BEM is a decent convention for old-school, global document styling, in the absence of scope. But it's also manual, error-prone, and verbose, making it a poor substitute for actual namespacing provided by components. I sympathize with your resistance to css-in-js; I've been doing webdev since 1998 and only really embraced it in the last couple years. I'm reminded of quotes like "The difficulty lies not so much in new ideas, but in escaping the old."

Fair enough. I felt the same way about JSX when it came out so maybe I need to give it another look. :)

I think BEM was the point where I decided to give up and accept CSS in my JS.