I’m familiar with the pain point you’re describing. It’s not the cascade, it’s the ability to target a child element through a selector. (Which utility based approaches do away with)

But the thing is you can always do that if it’s needed. There’s no one forcing you to strictly adopt the utility pattern. It’s all just vanilla CSS at the end of the day. If a hybrid approach works best for your project then do that.

Personally I find the need for this to be quite rare, and there are actually some good arguments against writing too much specificity in to your css even if it’s more convenient up front.