> After a decade+ of web dev and through making a career of web stuff I learned how much people seem to hate CSS.
Yeah because as soon as you're not tinkering with only your particular combination of device/screen/browser/browser version/OS/OS version but have to implement something reasonably widely supported all the subtle "we're not following the specs" get really annoying to deal with.
Microsoft used to be the most notorious specs violator, today it's Apple.
I think it depends mainly on where your personal sense of curiosity sits, on the spectrum of technical and finicky problems to solve in any given project, whether you'll hate it categorically because of the variances in implementation. I'd argue more of the general hatred comes from people naively expecting visual stuff to be trivial, instead of actually harder than a lot of other software implementation details. It's evident in the UX designers (hopefully of the past) that basically brought zero technical skills to the table and had no knowledge of even why mobile-first responsive design was more than just a marginally ideal approach.
Apply some deadline pressure, and the constraints of an existing complex frontend project, and all of a sudden the estimate you pulled out of your ass for a pixel-perfect design doesn't look so achievable; ergo, CSS sucks for some people.
Yeah because as soon as you're not tinkering with only your particular combination of device/screen/browser/browser version/OS/OS version but have to implement something reasonably widely supported all the subtle "we're not following the specs" get really annoying to deal with.
Microsoft used to be the most notorious specs violator, today it's Apple.