Here's the thing: Most of us who are perplexed are actually perplexed because is was something you used to be able to do trivially and then a new standard came

Here's the thing: Most of us who are perplexed are actually perplexed because is was something you used to be able to do trivially and then a new standard came along and made it unreasonably hard for about 15 years. An eternity in software development. Entire generations of paradigms have come and gone in the time it's taken for CSS to fill this gap. That will never stop being perplexing, no matter how many new models they throw on top to try to fix it.