After 30-years of CSS, we’re still debating what is the best unit to use.
It has never translated well to custom font settings from a user browser, but it turns out those are exceptionally rare vs people who just ctl/cmd +/- on the keyboard or pinch and zoom on the phone.
Anyways, CSS is fine. The problem space is complicated.
Nested tables and inline styling yeah. It works better. It's always worked better, unless you're handwriting your HTML, and virtually no-one does that anymore.
https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/a-guide-to-flexbox/
https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/complete-guide-grid/
As an aside, hand-rolling HTML templates is still pretty common (such as for SSG themes), which is substantially similar to hand-rolling HTML. You just get `if` and `for` and a couple other primitives.
I still remember the star selector pattern to prevent IE6 from reading malformed css. So me old.
But having grown up in my early career during the transition from embedding styles into html to sites like css zen garden, I am extremely critical of modern "frameworks".
I still see so much bloat in poor performing pages and often when I dig deeper it's tailwind in addition to other inefficiencies adding repeated cruft that doesn't help with site rendering.
A proper 20 year old understanding of css class style inheritance isn't hard, and it negates 80-90% of the complexity of maintaining complex web apps (react components mainly).
CSS grids are cute and useful, but for a hell of a lot of web interfaces a simple float and clear:left still works wonders.
A new styling language, with better syntax, written taking into account real-world scenarios, widely deployed across all browsers (or at least cross-compiling into CSS)?
I wouldn't hold my breath.