You can use flex or grid to opt out of margin collapsing and get your easy center alignments and justifications. You’re right that it’s super hard to accomplis

You can use flex or grid to opt out of margin collapsing and get your easy center alignments and justifications. You’re right that it’s super hard to accomplish that but you have to remember it’s also hard to accomplish that in real life if you’re mathing it out. It’s easy to look at something and put something in its center (probably not accurately but convincingly enough) but to automate it is a different case, especially when the DSL for doing so 1) must handle so many other structuring features, as you noted, 2) was originally designed for structuring text documents rather than applications, as you noted, and 3) must maintain backwards compatibility so as not to break the internet. It’s frustrating, it is. I’m not trying to say “margin collapsing takes precedence over your minute concerns!” I’m just suggesting one reason (of perhaps many reasons) why margin: auto isn’t an effective approach.