> To label it as a new thing that nobody else had done before though, that's going a bit far... Let's give it lots of credit, but not more than it deserves.

I never claimed it was "first" and I even called out "other frameworks like it." The iPhone was also not the first smartphone.

> CSS still makes layouts unreasonably complex imho.

This we can agree on. Though it could be a lot worse, and some of the newer CSS definitely gets rid of some of the warts. A lot of the bad CSS is mostly the backwards-compatible stuff.