<i>&gt;What is the alternative to CSS then? The alternative is inline styles. ... The idea is you apply styles to elements through JavaScript.</i><p>But if you have a non-trivial app with thousands of elements across hundreds of pages, people will inevitably want to &quot;tame&quot;, &quot;organize&quot;, &quot;consolidate&quot;, etc those <i>inline</i> styles into some coherent taxonomy to enforce <i>consistency.</i><p>Wherever and however the programmers decide to store this &quot;consistency taxonomy&quot; (e.g. into special .json files instead of .css files), they&#x27;ve just reinvented &quot;CSS&quot; by another name.<p>The 3 complaint bullet points at the top of the essay would then apply to the adhoc-this-is-not-CSS-but-it-acts-like-CSS system.