Reading some of the comments here reminds me of an extremely popular language that was designed from the start to encourage the use of a kind of class inheritan

Reading some of the comments here reminds me of an extremely popular language that was designed from the start to encourage the use of a kind of class inheritance. People built complex things with this language, using deep layers of nested inheritance, as was intended. Then they began to discover that, when your project reached a certain level of complexity, it was excruciating to try to figure out what was going on, and impossible to change anything without breaking eight other things far away. New, powerful features are added to this language every year, and are embraced by developers, but they have learned to tame it by avoiding its inheritance abilities, or using them very sparingly. They have even developed novel ways to use its power while largely avoiding inheritance—systems that have their own conventions and terminologies invented by end developers and not envisioned by the language designers. I’m talking about CSS, where class inheritance is called the “cascade.”