Flexbox did fix it, and it's been available in Chrome since 2013, Firefox since 2014, and everything else since 2015. IE 11 supported enough of the 2012 syntax to be usable. Even IE 10 supports some of it, albeit poorly.
2015 ? Yeah, I think I remember hearing about flexbox around that time, also when I stopped doing any CSS work (which I had started around ~2000 I think).