[manuelmoreale]

My sense of this (and I might be entirely wrong) is that CSS is a tool that is geared towards the presentation/design layer and that is somewhat removed from what most developers do or want to do or are happy doing.

It lives in this weird in between land where it's not really a programming language but it's complex enough to be hard to use by designers who are not really into programming.

I agree with you that mastering frontend requires a lot of time and practice, especially because it's a constantly moving target with new features, new tools and browsers that are constantly evolving.

I personally like it, I love the flexibility and I love that it's constantly changing and I have new tools I can use. It's also funny how there seems to be always something missing.

[runarberg]

This may be the case. While it is a standard practice in print design and graphic design that designers learn and use some tools to materialize these design into somewhat of a final product (tools like indesign, illustrator, etc.) it is not a common practice among web designers. A web designer is more likely to create a mock-up in a tool like figma, which a web developer than materialized into HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Of course there is an overlap, where a designer actually writes their own frontend or a web developer does their own design, but most of the industry has a separation there which is not present many other creative industries.

Perhaps there is a lack of understanding of the interaction between a web-developer and a web-designer which creates this unique negative perception of CSS as a tool. A back end developer might simply not understand it.