The call for CSS specialization strikes me as seriously misguided (even before agentic coding became a thing). Yes, web development is complex and you can’t know everything, but it is possible to learn what you need as you go and generally build up a strong high-level sense of what is possible and what approaches are reasonable for quality. But web development is not rocket science. Someone with CSS skills but not JS or probably some backend sensibilities as well is just not very useful. Being a software engineer inherently means comfort with change, it’s definitely a field that comes with a lot of challenge and potential for burnout if you don’t take care of yourself, but atomization of roles is definitely not the answer.

I'd always been amazed over the years by how many people didn't even attempt CSS. They looked at it like an after thought. Reminds me of a favorite Archer quote: "I thought we skipped that step.", "Skipped a step... in bomb defusal...?"

> Yes, web development is complex and you can’t know everything

Maybe you can't "master" every branch of web dev, but it's entirely possible to be competent at building out the whole stack if you focus on learning just one stack