When jQuery was in its prime, stubbornella was a fixture of youtube playlists. One of the feathers in her cap was cutting yahoo's CSS in half, which resonated with a lot of us. CSS has been problematic for a long time.
I used to hate code generators because the code quality was always so bad that if a midlevel or senior dev was writing code like that I'd be talking to our manager about firing them, and for a junior dev we'd be talking about more intensive mentoring or even a PIP.
Once Sass introduced SCSS, that was the first code generator I ever met that actually impressed me, and Less is very close. The default CSS out of it looked very much like the sort of CSS you would expect from a project after someone had already gone through and cleaned up all of the cliched failure modes for medium sized projects. It felt like having a fast forward button. Still one of the fastest 'sells' for me, and I do quite a lot of technology selection for projects.
Not that it's perfect. Poorly written mixins/functions can generate way more CSS per call than is necessary, and I have a team of overbooked people that I need to sell on prioritizing fixing this sort of thing and I just can't find the bandwidth because there are always 2 more pressing issues I need to talk to them about. I can't squeeze blood from stone, and I can only ask for personal favors about as frequently as I can grant them, modulo any turnover - which has become a problem. Turns out if I take a shine to you, you're also really easy to hire somewhere else.
