[fleddr]

Fully agree with your take. CSS should have more straightforward properties that actually do what people intuitively expect it to do without additional dependencies and weird side effects.

Even the supposedly favorable case of having a flexbox container with place-self: center in many cases still does not correctly center the child element. For example, a label inside a button. The label is typography, which means it has its own vertical spacing (line-height, top-cap, bottom margin) that may be unevenly distributed. Fixable, but now you're into the 3rd rabbit hole, just to center something.