Nested CSS selectors should be counted as a major win for everyone - to the point where there's proposals to support it in native CSS: https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/2701

My personal solution to avoid running watchers is to have a run-on-save task in VSCode that automatically compiles any "root" .scss file (eg */index.scss) into a .css file with an accompanying .css.map file.