I wish all the properties in CSS specs were categorized into layout-effecting, paint-affecting etc. in an explicit way, and this was used to solve at least some of the circularity issues, by allowing only paint-affecting properties in those complex cases.

Yes, this would reduce the possible use cases for those potential fixes, but this would also allow a lot more of the use-cases. And this kind of a limitation could be loosen when we’d come with more robust solutions to the circularity.

Obvious use case (and the most frustrating not to have in CSS) — `position: sticky` and the absence of the pseudo-class which you could use to set the styles for the stuck state to be different from the unstuck. This is a case where in 99% cases paint-only props would be enough.

In most cases for the :stuck which I had during my experience you could use just shadows/backgrounds/visibility/opacity/transforms to achieve most of the things you’d want to achieve.

Yep, also first-letter, first-line (which already had some circularity issues!), and we probably forget about some other stuff.