I think the ugliness is driven from a goal to create globally unique class names, that wouldn't conflict with e.g. a pre-built widget that was pulled from a thi

I think the ugliness is driven from a goal to create globally unique class names, that wouldn't conflict with e.g. a pre-built widget that was pulled from a third-party CDN rather than passing through the same asset builder. Which is not to say readability couldn't still be improved. Hopefully builders would have something akin to uglify options - how much do you want to minify and munge during your build process.