But after clicking around you realize that it does not anymore. Waaat? Maybe it's related to sidebar visibility changes? You open the inspector and see that .parent is {display:block}. Seems like some jQuery code assumed that display property is either `block` or `none`. Or something. Aaargh. The "sane" attribute of this solution was violated due to its non-locality to the `.rest`. Who could think that changing the display mode for the parent, which is indeed a private property of the parent, would lead to such an issue. You live and you learn css!
(Also, explanations for "intuitive" and/or "logical" are still missing.)