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>But to say that "the only way" to do anything on the web is the height of hubris, and closed-mindedness. How will you know when the next great thing comes along, if you've already committed yourself to an "only way?"

It's not the only way to do web development. But it's the only way to structure UI for an application. It's the pattern native developers have settled upon and used for decades. That's why it's been so frustrating for me waiting to see this paradigm come to web development. It's what iOS/Android/MacOS developers have enjoyed for years.

The tooling is finally mature now, and it's actually fun to develop for the web these days. But before the modern React/Babel/Webpack development environment, it was really tough to build large scale maintainable SPAs without massive expertise. There were things like GWT, Closure, Backbone, etc. But the sort of "batteries included" UI frameworks and IDEs that developers enjoyed in native development was nonexistent on the web until recently.

> it's the only way to structure UI for an application

No, it's not. Want consistency in all your text boxes/links/buttons? Are you going to copy/paste or inherit from a base button component or define the general common styles in one place and have the browser automatically apply them with 0 thought.

Need a button to be different - then do inline styles or more specific selector(incl. CSS in JS) or use !important.

As parent poster said, definitively stating there is only one true™ way to do something is the height of hubris.

> That's why it's been so frustrating for me waiting to see this paradigm come to web development

Inline styles were the norm for quite a long period of time...

In fact inline styles came first!

Here's roughly how I do it[1] ...

    import Button from '@material-ui/core/Button';

    export MyComponent = ({actions}) => (
      <Button 
        variant="outlined" 
        color="primary" 
        onClick={actions.save}
      >
        Save
      </Button>
    );

[1] https://material-ui.com/demos/buttons/

> Many of my sites are focused to low-education, low-ability, and marginalized people. That means accessibility, semantic coding, standards compliance, and clarity are paramount.

Those are nice! But they don't require that it be easy to swap out one global CSS for a completely different one. Which is what is accused of "breaking down" in the post you replied to.

I think his point was more that we're developing the web building over foundations set with the idea of static documents in mind, for far different use cases that were originally intended. It does raise a point over whether we should consider a new design.