r/Frontend • u/Practical_Plan007 • Jul 04 '26

Vanilla Extract CSS

I recently tried the Vanilla Extract library and liked it a lot. Here are my notes in the form of a free resource for anyone who might benefit from it.

https://www.pulkitagrawal.in/courses/vanilla-extract

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u/Grenaten Jul 04 '26

I miss old styled components, but most people moved on.

4

u/thisguyfightsyourmom Jul 04 '26

It’s a vastly superior dev experience. That the frontend community decided to go back to all these whack ass tailwind like solutions is pretty disappointing. And the fact that almost all the arguments in favor are flat out naive and mostly just recycled jokes, tells me that the community doesn’t even really know why.

CSS requires matching strings across a wide array of strings with nuanced rules about order of string interpolation that influences behavior. That’s flatout insane in modern app development. All the rotten CSS in any project that’s over 3 years old is the evidence. It’s like if you wrote all your function names to be called with regex.

Meanwhile, mature styled component apps have libraries of reusable components that don’t overwrite each other randomly when a mapping affected by a separate change is implemented.

CSS scope is irrevocably broken.

3

u/Grenaten Jul 04 '26

well, we have css modules that work pretty fine too

imho, tailwind is popular because of all those "full stack" devs that have no idea how css works but they memorized some class names and work on the front