[gherkinnn]

> I personally have no desire to go back to the days of vanilla CSS, so you need a SASS/SCSS transpiler

Modern CSS is amazing. Why on earth would anyone use SCSS? It pays to look at what Vanilla can do these days.

> Even a "thin" layer of JS on top requires some degree of dependency management

Use modules and import away. If it is truly a thing layer, there's no need for further optimisation until far along in the product.

[flimsypremise]

Modern CSS has _some_ of the features of SCSS/SASS. It does not have all of them. But most importantly, many of dependencies one might want to use also make use of SCSS/SASS downstream. If you're happy to build everything from scratch and eschew any dependencies that require a build system, then have fun explaining to your product person why it took so much time to build a thing that they know very well is a pre-built component in some frontend library somewhere.

[gherkinnn]

> Modern CSS has _some_ of the features of SCSS/SASS. It does not have all of them

You say it like more those features are desirable.

> then have fun explaining to your product person why it took so much time to build a thing that they know very well is a pre-built component

Sure. I wasted more time getting an assortment of pre-built components to behave than I did building the basics from scratch. And then comes a breaking change. And then that component library uses styled components and doesn't run properly on the server. Why do people do this to themselves?