[matchu]

Bandwidth was the major motivation for building Aphrodite, too: Khan Academy wanted to decrease the number of bytes required for the initial pageload. http://engineering.khanacademy.org/posts/aphrodite-inline-cs...

> We must deliver the absolute minimum amount of CSS necessary by only sending down CSS in use by components in the server-side rendered body. This rules out extracting all the CSS used in all of our components at compilation time, as much of that CSS would not be needed for the initial page load.

Colocating styles with components is a win, but, more importantly, styles-as-JS-objects was the simplest way to get this perf feature out the door.