I'm with you. My SCSS is really just CSS with nesting. My CSS is cleaner without any downside. I've never experienced issues with maintainability, even in large CSS files.

That's where I am on this. Before nesting I had to take great care to avoid conflicts. I guess this is what BEM set out to solve, but it seems to have limitations.

Why would sass have any effect on whether or not you have conflicts? You can just do things in plain CSS with descendant (' ') selectors, same as if they were nested in sass.

Sure, but that's a bit like arguing that you don't need 'scope' for your variables and you can just prepend the function name (or multiple nested function names). Or that you don't need modules but can just put all your code in one file.

At the very least support of nesting is a huge convenience, but in practice I've also found that it saves me from all sorts mistakes, whether it's because I'm being stupid, or refactoring things.

That said, overusing nested selectors can be a problem too. I generally try to limit myself to two levels of nesting (component -> element), and then a third for pseudo-classes (:hover, :selected, etc.) and pseudo-elements (:before, etc.).

Probably for the same reason some people don't see the downsides of C++ or Java... you tend not to see the downsides, if you're good at it.

I just feel that nesting (which Sass encourages) leads to complexity and fragility.