[WorldMaker]

`vertical-align: middle` would also likely give them better preferred alignment the first time a "pill" thinks it needs a second line of text and sometimes when too many pills exist for available width and the container starts to spill to another row.

I understand why `vertical-align: baseline` is the default, but it seems like such a bad default for all the ways designers like to (over) use Flexbox. (Especially because designers really love the baseline alignment at first but often can't seem to think two and four dimensionally enough when designs meet real world constraints and user data and need to expand/contract/shift to available space.)

[dsego]

But flexbox is much newer than vertical-align.

[WorldMaker]

As I said, I know why it is the default. There's nothing that would have stopped `display: flex` having a different default `vertical-align` given `vertical-align` original use cases mostly didn't overlap anyway, but that's obviously armchair quarterbacking and we have the CSS we have.