Well at least you can google it… But it certainly doesn’t help. I keep my css specific to each class and try to be as explicit as possible to avoid any weird consequences.
That’s kind of the opposite problem that the article mentions though — if every component has its own specific CSS, then you don’t really have CSS, you just have SS. You miss out on the cascading.
I develop things at work similarly to you. JSS where every component has its own style, but you have a common `theme` file so that you can reuse the common styles via a library.
But I have a certain romantic feeling about… what if we could do 90%+ of our styling using these global-per-page rules, and overriding when necessary. The simplicity is really appealing
For me, your approach makes the CSS harder to maintain. Pages have loads of repetition and patterns. I’d hope to find a good balance between DRYing up patterns that benefit from it, and leaving space for special cases. I find code patterns like the owl/.flow shown in the OP help greatly with that.
Your approach, redefining all the properties per class, echoes avoiding using parent+subclass relationships in OO style code. Sometimes you benefit from the generalisation of a class hierarchy, sometimes you don’t. A hard rule in either direction gets in everyone's way.
The 'C' in CSS was a mistake. Consider that specificity is even a thing, and then consider that the ordering of your declarative CSS code matters. IDK, it does seem necessary to make the language workable, but there are far too many stylesheets out there with specificity hacks and !important.
It's almost like you're saying: because people use CSS without learning it or the problem domain it tries to solve, CSS is wrong.
The "C" is an attempt to make it easy to have a mixture of generic rules that apply across the whole page/site, and specific rules for alternatives and edge cases. CSS and particularly the C make it really easy to say:
What's wrong with that? How would you do it otherwise? In a way that generalises to any HTML or XML element? Without changing HTML or XML? It's essentially a syntactic formulation of multiple inheritance. I accept that multiple inheritance is frowned upon and difficult, but it's not without precedent or practicality.
In response to "How would you do it otherwise?", like I said, it kind of seems like the language is just what it has to be in order to be workable. In other words, it seems like it designed itself to some extent. And you're right, CSS has practicality. But with almost any pre-built solution, those selectors would look something like `button.cta.xl-2-large:not(:is(.container > .button))`. At that level of complexity, which is not uncommon, you're better off just coming up with a unique ID for every situation and styling things by ID rather than trying to make them "semantic" with the selectors. That's the other problem is the mixture of selectors trying to be both semantic but also their increased expressivity changing the specificity. So if you change a selector, you might need to reorder your CSS or change a bunch of other selectors to match, which becomes untenable the more CSS you have.
I detect a pungent "code smell", and probably a design bug via your example selector.
Does the designer really want such a specific edge case to an edge case? Can they explain or justify it according to the design patterns they laid down? Why are we using such a general ".container" to specify a ".button", and whilst we're at it why do we have a "button" AND a ".button". Our codebase was going off the rails long before we reached this (admittedly scary-looking) selector. There was a better way to do what we're doing, several iterations ago, and people who cared about the ux+information design and the CSS should have caught it sooner. Go back to them and fix the problem there rather than let this horrible selector pass code review.
We wouldn't stand for this in the TS/JS codebase. Why do we put up with it in the CSS?
To be honest, I was never on board with the "classes everywhere" approach. IDs are fine when they identify a single item on the page. We lost something when we stopped using the language as it was designed.