That's a different discussion and frankly not something for developers to decide. If a product is designed to behave and look a certain way, then as an engineer

That's a different discussion and frankly not something for developers to decide. If a product is designed to behave and look a certain way, then as an engineer you have the job of determining the best way to accomplish that objective. If your decision is to forgo using CSS for an alternative, fine but no one has provided what that alternative is. I'd much rather use CSS instead of Javascript or going back to the days of hacking <table> to get a certain layout.