When people talk about samples like yours with "the latter being hard to read" I genuinely have ZERO clue what the blazes people are talking bout. Why? Because we have a simple single line telling you EXACTLY what it's being applied to, with no excess whitespace and curly braces making me have to scan and scan and scan a dozen lines just to figure out what the target rules are!

On a small snippet like this, it's easy to card-stack nesting into looking simpler. But if you have real code where your declarations for each of the nested children are anywhere from a half dozen to two dozen lines long, the constant "scroll up, scroll down, scroll up, scroll down" is NOT easier to work with, particularly if you can't even fit the entire nesting structure on screen at once!

Overall LESS/SASS/SCSS are crutches for people who never learn to use CSS properly.. but worse that lack of learning CSS stems from the reek of ignorance of how to write CSS. When people are writing two to ten times the HTML needed to do the job and fail to leverage their semantic structure, it's hardly a shock they vomit up 500k of CSS to do 48k or less' job.

And that's really the big problem with these CSS pre-processors. If you have enough CSS for any of the ALLEGED "benefits" of them to be true, you likely have ten times or more the CSS you should in the first place.

Thus like the idiocy of HTML/CSS frameworks, the failure to grasp how to use HTML or CSS properly leads to people working harder, not smarter. That all of these systems use endless streams of propaganda and bunko to promote bald faced LIES about being "easier", or "simpler", or "better for collaboration" being the only means by which they continue to stay afloat; preying on the ignorance of beginners and the faithful like cut-rate cults.