Multiple accounts of people not in your position telling you a problem exists. Ok, great, you worked through it. Doesn't mean it's as good as it should be.
I am here to argue that this sort of attitude is problematic. If you browse through this thread you will find no shortage of comments describing how absolutely basic this article is (and a little void of insight, and a little out dated), and that there are people in the industry getting six figures while not knowing this stuff. Frankly it is a little insulting. And I think the attitude that you presented above is part of the problem. There definitely exists a lack of respect for the craft of front-end development within our industry. This sort of attitude is not helping.
There is xenophobia involved in people's attitudes toward kebabs. It doesn't change the impact of phosphates on the human body.
Here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-42238363
Your argument doesn't change the impact of poorly-encapsulated complexity on the brains and mental health of your fellow programmers.
https://blog.codinghorror.com/programmers-and-chefs/
> Well you come across as an outsider telling us that the tools that we use—and do a fine job with—are no good, and that our literature sucks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle
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Backend programming has this problem too. So does systems programming. The problem of unencapsulated complexity is core to the craft of software engineering.
So is joining the fight against this problem. https://tonyarcieri.com/would-rust-have-prevented-heartbleed...
Surely the point is that you shouldn't need to spend thousands of hours "mastering" something like CSS? It's not that complicated and it's not that important. If you told a developer working on desktop or mobile applications that they'd need to spend years "mastering" the design tools in whatever GUI framework they were using before they'd be able to independently build a good user interface, you'd be ridiculed.
Anyone with the aptitude and interest to become a web developer, which isn't a particularly high bar as technologies go, should be able to get the hang of all the important parts of modern CSS in at most a week even starting from scratch. The fact that we don't reliably train new developers up that efficiently is a damning indictment of the current state of the industry.
I am a front-end dev by trade and I could really easily say similar things about the tech stack you work with daily.
If you want a good reference and a learning guide start with this: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS it is what us professional use.
For us professionals that use CSS in our jobs, that have put the same amount of hours into front end technology as you have done for back-end, CSS is a perfectly cromulent technology. It is easy to work with, it is intuitive, it is easy to find a good reference (go to MDN not random blog posts from people that are admittedly not masters of the craft).
If I try to cobble together a back-end I expect to be frustrated with it, I expect not to be able to do everything, I expect I’d need to find poor example and try to hammer them in to fit my needs, I don’t expect to be able to understand all the example snippets. Why are you on your high horse judging my tech stack this way?
If you need a good well crafted front-end for your project, you should hire a professional front-end developer. Or find a friend who is one that is willing to it in their spare time. Or spend a few thousand hours learning and mastering the craft. Alternatively you can cobble together a good-enough front-end that works, just don’t complain about how hard it is because “technology hard wheee wheee”. Us professionals use it every day and are fine with it.