[btown]

Cascade is the worst possible word to use for someone coming from a CSS background. From the very beginning of CSS history, cascading was tied to a notion of specificity - if you have a rule for h1 it overrides what was in the html rule. https://css-tricks.com/look-back-history-css/

But whatever Firebase is doing, it’s the opposite of specificity - it’s closer to “search top down until we find something truthy then stop.” https://firebase.google.com/docs/database/security/

This is simpler and more efficient to implement and run at scale. But imagine if styling worked like that - you could never have colored overlays, or anything we take for granted.

When over-eager marketing speak encourages insecurity, it’s a significant ethical breach.