To be honest, just as my articles are oft overburdened by colourful language, this one is crippled by marketspeak double-talk. Wading through the plethora of BS bingo, I honestly cannot decipher what half of this is even trying to say.

It's a bit like the hand-waving Intel keynote from a year or so ago, where as Steve from GN kept asking "but what does that mean?"

For example:

"Although every developer looks for unopinionated tools to use, the reality is that as soon as a product plan is struck, technology decisions are made that create a very opinionated tool kit that the team is required to use. "

You've got a bunch of words, but what is that even trying to SAY?

Though to be fair I've so little stomach for bullshit bingo, that phrases like "evergreen browsers" makes me want to vomit.

As to "goldilocks CSS" it looks like it ignores my message entirely, despite the shoutout. The site for it does all sorts of bad things like static scripting in the markup, scripting in the middle of the markup, onevent attributes like it's still 1997, that "pick a size" nonsense like it's still 2008 that wouldn't be needed if you just used em/rem properly, forms for nothing on scripting only input (that should be button)...

Mind you, it's surely not the worst I've ever seen, though it does feel a bit dated on some of the form elements. At least it doesn't seem to vomit up ten times the markup needed like some frameworks I could mention. The homepage of the project for example is what? 29k to deliver 2.5k of plaintext and zero content media? I'd call that a bloated wreck if not for the sheer volume of anchors present. Even so, I'd still figure it's double what it should be just from duplicate content with the same menus twice (good way to get pimp slapped clear off of search), absolute URI's for nothing... realistically that's 12k or less' job.

Which is why the 186k of CSS that is goldilocks MINIFIED becomes absurd when even the largest stie many times more complex really has no reason to use more than 48k of CSS. Your goldilocks-CSS before gzip is larger than the entire page load should be not counting images!

And for what? to write twice or more the HTML needed whilst adding as much if not more to learn than HTML and CSS combined? Whilst still needing 8k or so of custom CSS per page?

I don't think I'll ever understand where people get this ridiculous notion that frameworks of any flavor when it comes to HTML/CSS are doing them any favors. It's more to work with, more to learn, saves no actual time, and generally reeks of being created by those not ready to actually write HTML properly. Using almost 200k of CSS so you can write two to ten times the HTML is not better, easier, or simpler. It sure as shine-ola doesn't "scale upwards better" despite the wild protestation from the know-nothing fanboys of the concept... as indeed, the very concept itself of a HTML/CSS framework is flawed to the bone.

Because all these framework makers are just jumping the gun thinking they know a better way, before they know enough HTML or CSS to even know what better is. Here's a tip, HTML and CSS are your framework. Slopping another layer of abstraction atop it amounts to nothing more than false simplicity.