[throwaway425933]

I feel you my friend. I am in exactly same boat. I even asked here previously on what CSS resources I can ready/follow.

Ultimately, I gave up and hired frontend engineers from low cost countries to build the frontend for me. I just write backend APIs. Life has been much better with this strategy. One thing that may help though is to pick tailwind css. It may ease the pain to some extent.

To anyone who says use codepen, MDN docs, smashingmagazine CSS tutorials, inspect console and a bunch of other resources, I tell them this. None of these tutorials help you when you have to reason why things are not coming out the way you expect them to. There is no "compiler" for CSS which spits out error messages. You cant describe a behavior and ask the browser to tell why given CSS will not give said behavior. Most tutorials are about simple boxes and simple websites. When you have to modify something in a complex webapp, it pays to do it under an able mentor.

</rant>

[websap]

Yup, you are spot on about the compiler, and the jump from 101 tutorials to building meaningful things.

Tailwind keeps being mentioned in this post. Will take a look at using it.