No one ever really decided that floats were the way to layout columns as far as I know. It's completely about "current language features". The standards group was just too slow to implement a decent alternative so we had to use floats. But flexbox[1] is the solution to lots of the problems you are mentioning, and it's almost support in all modern browsers, so very soon we can start abandoning floats and absolute positioning in our layouts.

Meanwhile, CSS is still a well-designed language in terms of syntax and principles. We just need a few more features that weren't in the original spec as new uses for the web emerge.

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Guide/CSS/Flexi...