We were promised elegance. What we got was runtime CSS parsing, unreadable class names, and hydration bugs straight out of hell. CSS-in-JS was supposed to free us from global namespace nightmares and styling spaghetti.
Instead, it wrapped us in a shiny new layer of chaos — one that performs worse, reads worse, and somehow costs more CPU cycles to do what a plain stylesheet did perfectly fine two decades ago. This is not evolution; I’d call it over-engineering disguised as progress.
From Liberation to Performance Lock-In
When CSS-in-JS…
