I feel like the frontend gets an unfair treatment by many here on HN. I doubt people complain that the standard library of python is too vast, and you cannot master it. I feel like there is a lack of respect for professionalism on the front end stack and a lack of understanding that we front end developers actually spend a lot of time mastering this craft so we can use it skillfully at our jobs.
The only way I can make sense of this sentiment is that people feel like CSS is something to hack with, it is a toy, for hackers to play with, not a tool for professionals who spend years mastering the skill. I wonder why this is.
My sense of this (and I might be entirely wrong) is that CSS is a tool that is geared towards the presentation/design layer and that is somewhat removed from what most developers do or want to do or are happy doing.
It lives in this weird in between land where it's not really a programming language but it's complex enough to be hard to use by designers who are not really into programming.
I agree with you that mastering frontend requires a lot of time and practice, especially because it's a constantly moving target with new features, new tools and browsers that are constantly evolving.
I personally like it, I love the flexibility and I love that it's constantly changing and I have new tools I can use. It's also funny how there seems to be always something missing.
This may be the case. While it is a standard practice in print design and graphic design that designers learn and use some tools to materialize these design into somewhat of a final product (tools like indesign, illustrator, etc.) it is not a common practice among web designers. A web designer is more likely to create a mock-up in a tool like figma, which a web developer than materialized into HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Of course there is an overlap, where a designer actually writes their own frontend or a web developer does their own design, but most of the industry has a separation there which is not present many other creative industries.
Perhaps there is a lack of understanding of the interaction between a web-developer and a web-designer which creates this unique negative perception of CSS as a tool. A back end developer might simply not understand it.
Isn't the critique that CSS is not at the right level? It's a collection of very specific pragmatic APIs? At least during the big Houdini effort it seemed like browser vendors want to offer something lower level, that allows more and better control of the whole layout and rendering pipeline. Please correct and extend my comment if possible, because I'm admittedly now up to date with even the status of that aforementioned project.
The only way I can make sense of this sentiment is that people feel like CSS is something to hack with, it is a toy, for hackers to play with, not a tool for professionals who spend years mastering the skill. I wonder why this is.