I'm pretty skeptical of that quote: HN's CSS is pretty minimal and comes in at 174 lines: https://news.ycombinator.com/news.css It seems to be based on the W3C website where apparently 90% of style sheets are <163 lines, but I'd like to see that distribution over the internet as a whole.

Sidenote: the html markup of HN doesn't lend itself to "clean" css (whatever that means). Hence maybe why it's bit over that 163 mark line.

Nested tables inside nested tables, with styles inlined.

True, but moving styles from inline or moving from tables would almost definitely add more CSS lines.

It doesn't matter whether the quote is accurate now or even whether it was accurate in 2008 when it was originally written. What matters was that this formed the rationale for keeping variables out of CSS.

Ah I didn't catch it was written in 2008 before Bootstrap :) I'd say that time gap is significant though because CSS does have variables now.