"[Too many] steps removed from actual CSS" is the whole point. From what I've seen at multiple productive companies is that people just aren't good at writing CSS.

People who are really good at it are few and far between, so CSS-in-JS is an attempt to scale out styling across a large team that lacks widespread expertise in it.

Being really good with italics seems like a higher bar than we're demanding for CSS-in-JS. It's not that hard to get a baseline level of competence in CSS. If you learned react, you can definitely get productive with CSS. I'm not sure why CSS has developed this aura of arcane mysticism.