Why I stopped using a CSS framework
Three years of overriding someone else's opinions, and what replaced them.
Every framework is a set of answers to questions someone else was asking. That is fine until your questions differ, and then every line you write is an argument with the defaults.
Why this happened
It started with a card. The framework had one, and it was nearly right — which is worse than being wrong, because nearly right gets overridden instead of replaced.
A component you have overridden four times is a component you now own, with none of the benefits of owning it.
What it cost
Forty kilobytes of CSS to ship six components, and a build step to remove the rest of it.
What replaced it
Two tiers of custom properties and about thirty components. The whole thing is smaller than the framework's grid system was.
Was it worth it
The honest answer is that it was worth it the second time. The first attempt was a framework with my name on it.
Related posts
Three more on the same argument.
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The implicit grid explanation finally made this click for me. I had been declaring rows for years without knowing why it sometimes worked anyway.
That is exactly the trap — it works right up until the content count changes. Glad it helped.
Would love a follow-up on subgrid. It is the one part I still avoid.