[EyeSayUntoThee]

Well, coding != complicated frontend development, which it appears you are teaching your students as an allegedly "easy" programming environment.

You could perhaps consider starting them with Racket or some other "batteries included" programming environments specifically designed to avoid tooling bogs?

[mdaniel]

I would offer that writing CSS is for sure "coding" in my world because the computers they are so picky about all those goofy characters. Damn, they have to be in the right order and matched up and everything :-D

But I would be on-board if someone said that CSS is not "programming" since (AFAIK) there are no iterations, very few conditional statements, no recursion, and "library" means something entirely different

[eyelidlessness]

CSS definitely has iterations. Animations are the most obvious, but you could definitely build a state machine which progressively passes through and even recurses on state with custom properties (“variables”) and various conditional interactions from media/container queries.

I’m not inclined to do this, because I have way too long a list of higher priorities, but I could possibly be nerd sniped into showing some proofs of concept if the idea sounds outlandish.