Thanks, that analysis was worth adding. You're saying 2 years, I've heard other people say they would
maybe consider relying on this in 5. It's really dependent on the software you work on.
So an estimate of around 20 years from the time people started using things like variables and nesting to improve writing CSS to being able to actually write real CSS using those features and actually being able to count on broad browser support.
Then I think about things like JavaScript modules, and how completely fucked up that entire ecosystem is for so many reasons.
And then condescending comments in the parent like "I think they just don't understand what can be done with just HTML/CSS these days, they're so used to complexity" - people who have clearly never worked in front-end development as their day job. It's insulting and reductive.
I am glad that this stuff made it into the spec, and I know that over the next 5 years, things like native CSS variables and nesting will become more common until Sass/PostCSS is scarce, but they will probably still be being used inside of abstractions like SPA frameworks. And all of the JavaScript will unfortunately probably be written in TypeScript.
To me, the holy grail end game of front-end development is the elimination of a build step. And for that to happen before I hit retirement we have to find some way of decreasing the lead time of innovation -> spec implementation -> browser support from 20 years to < 5 years. Obviously, browsers becoming evergreen and Internet Explorer finally dying will help. Already, simpler tooling is becoming more prominent than the dark days of Webpack. But there's still a long, long way to go. This is all assuming Google doesn't finally figure out a way to destroy the open web all together before this happens.