[smrq]

It seems like you're not comparing apples to apples. Investigating someone else's code to alter it is always going to be harder than writing new code, even on paper in several languages.

I do think that CSS has enough footguns to say that arbitrary CSS is not very good; well-written CSS is a very small subset of CSS in general. It joins many other languages in that regard-- C, C++, Javascript, PHP, Bash, the list goes on and on. As in all of those languages and more, with some basic familiarity it's not hard to sling some fresh code together and have it do what you want. Making it scale maintainably is the hard part.

(For my 2 cents on the matter, the way to write Good CSS(tm) is using CSS modules to limit scope, using flexbox or grid for all layout, and being rigorous about creating stacking contexts when you need to modify z order. Application of these three rules has made my life as a senior frontend engineer generally quite easy.)