Your comment is some interesting food for thought, but I wanted to respond to a couple statements you made:

> not being able to center text no matter how much frontend experience we have

Not being able to center things is a bit of a meme, but flexbox was introduced back in 2009 and has been supported by major browsers for quite a long time. Centering text and elements is now extremely easy.

> css could benefit from knowing about the dimensions of container elements

You're in luck! Container queries were added to CSS fairly recently:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_contain...