"Just because you don't think design and layout are not important or difficult"

I said neither of these and am not interested in debating a strawman.

I'm not sure why your dismissive tone is somehow upvoted here. I rarely comment and do not see how this as a strawman. If this is not a strawman, then explain how a 15yo with notepad can do the same as these solutions with a defensible stance. Is it because the person replying to you wasn't nice and give you fluffy kind words? I'm not understanding why the thin skin here. If you make a bold statement, it should be able to be backed up. Problem is here that you can't, so just ad hominem instead.

You pulled this account out -- one that had been untouched for seemingly seven years -- to make these insults?

If you can't separate design from Yet Another Trivial Variation on a Theme, that's a you problem. Trying to conflate the two is disingenuous.

Yep, 7 years. Reflective of the quality of conversation here, where I read daily but don't interact. However, seeing quality lower even further by baseless well-written opinions prompted me to respond. I'm especially disappointed to see when someone challenges an opinion that it got downvoted. This type of voting behavior makes having a dialog impossible. I'm not even saying you're wrong here, just the reaction is lacking substance.

I stated a general sentiment of the trends in web development, where there is an extraordinary amount of work to effectively reinvent the wheel, and then to uninvent the wheel and herald why using a cube is superior, until eventually you herald the wheel again. It's bizarre.

The work product of teams chasing each of these innovations is virtually unchanged, decade over decade. Which is exactly why you see a circular procession of revolutions, each displacing the last to the dustbin of history, while empirically offering nothing unique.

Clearly there are a lot of people that empathize with it. There is nothing "baseless" about that, however uncomfortable some find it.

Bizarre that you claimed that my comment was an "ad hominem", when your own reply included multiple personal attacks and mine included none. They (you?) literally tried to discount my comment by contriving a strawman that if this application and management of CSS is trivial, therefore I'm saying that design is trivial. That is absurd, and is completely orthogonal.

What exactly do you think all these libraries and magical solutions are trying to address then? 15 year olds putting a spinning link gif on a static HTML page?

In fairness those pages offered more content per square inch than modern whitespace centric design.

They try do address the fear of dealing with CSS by people who do not know nor want to know it.