CSS grids are pretty nice, flexbox is ok, float hacks were fine and an improvement over table shenanigans. On the other hand I quite liked the simple hbox/vbox

CSS grids are pretty nice, flexbox is ok, float hacks were fine and an improvement over table shenanigans. On the other hand I quite liked the simple hbox/vbox explicit elements that things like ActionScript + MXML had (Flex). I liked Flex overall quite a bit, even if it was just another ill-fated attempt at freeing us from the browser strangleholds like Java applets and the rest. Having native platform functionality and a bunch of other nice things readily available now (barring Safari, especially mobile Safari, holding everyone back worse than IE6 did) is nice, but it doesn't quite feel like innovation when much of that was available via plugins back in the day.