This. Stuff like this is why the modern web feels so slow and eats absurd amounts of memory. Think how big that is in memory once it's turned into some data structure that can be queried & modified by Javascript, and re-calculated, and consulted again as screen size changes, and so on. And think how much memory has to be allocated to effect that transformation in the first place. And cycles burned actually doing it.

Well, that and no-one cares about shipping massive media files with the initial page anymore (remember thumbnails? Anyone? No?)

And, you know, just all of Javascript.

But still. This is a problem.

I think when your CSS passes short-story length you maybe need to re-evaluate what you're doing. Consider sitting down to write a short story, like a 5,000-10,000 word thing you could sell to a genre mag. It's not all that short. It's a fuckload of text, actually, if you are facing having to write it. That's a lot of CSS. So much any sane person would hate to have to sit down and read it beginning to end. Should be more than enough, even for complex layouts, even for fancy pages, even for responsive. 500K is almost half a Moby Dick, for comparison. There's no possible way your team even knows what most of it does.