I develop a lot UI apps (mostly Angular) and these days I just use a framework like Bootstrap or Foundation. The myriad of layout options in pure CSS is overwhelming and mind boggling, especially when it comes to responsive design. I have tried using pure CSS but find myself writing lots of boilerplate code and coming up with amounts to a mini framework. Unless you’re designing a custom bespoke designer web site, I don’t personally see the need for constantly reinventing the wheel.
There's still some boilerplate, but I'm a big fan of Open Props[0] because it takes a hybrid approach. CSS isn't necessarily reinventing the wheel, but allowing for easier / more powerful approaches to difficult layouts or things that would otherwise require JS. Bootstrap is fine but troubleshooting advanced layout issues involves a lot of inspecting elements to see what styles are actually being applied (at least in my experience, YMMV) so I'd personally always bet on CSS.
A new feature that I'm excited about is the `@scope` rule which is going to make scoped styles a lot easier.
Yes and no. The key selling point of Bootstrap (and similar) was that a design-blind (so to speak) backend dev/eng could use it and would have to work very hard to "design" something that was ugly, hard to look at, hard to use, etc.
Sure there are a bunch of helper classes, and such, but the key is an end product that does look like a backend dev/eng built it.
