[tannhaeuser]

CSS definitely can get in the way with far-distance effects in MVw apps. It tends to not being particularly representative of how you think about and modify the app during development, nor during maintenance. Though you still need media queries since you can't use these and eg :visited etc as inline styles. The reasoning behind this asymetry isn't entirely clear to me; it seems to be a syntactic accident.

Actually, I think CSS sucks at most things. Now CSS grid and flexbox are sold as solutions for long-standing layout deficiencies - and they undoubtly are a progress over grid frameworks using floats. But the real question is what is gained by pretending we're editing a hierarchical document (using HTML envisioned for casual academic publishing like it's 1999) when we layer a layout engine on top of it complicated enough to abstract that 1999s HTML into a grid and constraint-based layout? Why not just write markup representing that conceptual layout in the first place? We now have an enormous syntax proliferation of a markup language with an additional, redundant, and idiosyncratic item-value syntax (CSS) but still can't specify layout constraints in their more natural form as systems of inequalities.