CSS needs better boundaries, not more power, argues developer essay

A DEV Community article argues that CSS has earned its reputation for unpredictability not due to lack of features, but due to poorly defined boundaries between presentation, state, and business logic. The author contends that common CSS problems — such as specificity conflicts, style resets, and code entropy — are fundamentally boundary problems, not capability problems. When developers bypass CSS in favor of inline JavaScript styles, the article warns, unpredictability is not solved but merely shifted to a less structured environment. The piece maintains that CSS already holds genuine browser-granted authority over presentation, transitions, layout, and rendering — and that this scope is sufficient. The core recommendation is that JavaScript should manage application state while CSS exclusively owns the resulting presentation, keeping the two concerns clearly separated.