I suspect it has something to do with the state of the art at the time you initially learned CSS. Grid came so much later and superseded so much of what came before that it's basically likely throwing away everything we know and starting to learn from scratch.

Grid had a very awkward release / compatibility story so loads of devs who were looking for a good support story just used flexbox to accomplish what they needed to do and never learned grid. The zeitgeist of grid kind of ended before support hit acceptable levels, and grid is more or less just a syntactical wrapper around flex. The `gap` property is the real killer

I use flexbox extensively, but almost never use grid. I haven't taken the time to learn it and the API is not clear enough to pick it up intuitively. I might use it if I could read some type of primer on the basic concepts.

> I am not sure why grid is one of the most useful, yet underutilized set of features in CSS

First time I tried to use grid layout, we had to roll back the changes because it didn't work in IE11... now that IE11 support is being phased out in most places it might be more usable now?

I do agree that the grid stuff is a little too robust. I'm also finding myself looking it all up again every time I need to use it... but maybe I just don't have the muscle memory down yet like I do with flexbox.

> now that IE11 support is being phased out

Between last year and this year, our IE11 visitors shrank from a few percent (I think it was 5% during the week, under 1 on the weekend…) to under 1, and I got permission to kick IE11 support. Already implemented the first grid and can’t wait to use CSS variables. It’s like I suddenly landed in the future :)

IE11 supports CSS Grid... but an older version. I have to support IE11, and I uses CSS Grid. Not works out of the box on every case, and I need sometimes to write IE11 only media blocks to fix some details. CSS autoprefixer helps here a lot.

Same. I’ve been doing web dev since before FrontPage and I still have to Google a lot of CSS Grid properties. I don’t have an aversion to it, I just haven’t picked it up for some reason.

I think it has a lot to do with perceived browser support and lack of familiarity. Perhaps also a bit of CSS fatigue: “I just learned flex bix and that’s good enough.”

I feel the same issue and I'm 24, I think css grid is overwhelming

No, you are not alone. CSS Grid takes everything you could achieve with Flexbox and makes it more difficult.

You're not alone. Flex and grid are so complex you need to be full-time front-end to master them. The old complexity has been replaced by something even more complex.