I’m convinced 40%+ of the anti-CSS complaining is out of frustration from folks who haven’t actually learned how Specificity works. I wrote CSS for five years before I knew this is a thing I needed to learn. It was @mholzschlag who taught me, at a presentation she gave in NYC.

100% agree. I've found a big part of it is that many developers' first experience with CSS is often with frameworks like Bootstrap that have some really terrible anti-patterns in their codebases. Highly specific selectors, overriding its own values etc.

If you're a person complaining about CSS and you haven't even learned about specificity, I dunno what to tell you....

I think the thing to tell them is to read up about specificity. :) Hopefully the more of us that write great articles like @EmmaWedekind, the harder it will become for them to say they didn't know.