"Building a Toolkit for Design" by Matthew Griffith

Ha! Long time no see :) I'm no Elm expert, but I would say from what I've seen that mixing-and-matching (JS+Elm, CSS+Elm) as you see fit is totally fine, adopting Elm can be super incremental. When it comes to changing CSS dynamically, it's quite nice to have that in Elm code too rather than say a CSS class you toggle. The thing I'm using here is elm-ui, it takes a more opinionated approach and basically eliminates a lot of the CSS oddities: instead of numerous flex, margin etc. CSS properties you just get simple alignLeft, centerX, etc. attributes in a row/column layout. Quite nice. There's a talk[0] about it. [0] ▶ this video

For those who want a fresh perspective on CSS, layout and styling, check out this talk by Matthew Griffith - the creator of elm-ui ▶ this video

Elm + elm-ui[1] (dont worry about CSS so much) + generated Elm client lib from GraphQL schema + Hasura (GraphQL over Postgres) + Postgres => strong type safety from db schema to frontend with SPA-first workflow; possibly add ReactAdmin[2] to the mix if that sort of thing is needed. Rust + Actix + Yew (Rust browser framework compiling to WASM) => also verrrry nice vor SPA-first! Slightly more traditional: Kotlin and jOOQ on the server side. I also tend to let go of the HTML syntax lately, by using templating eDSLs such as in Elm, or in Rust's Maud[3], or in Kotlin's kotlinx.html or HtmlFlow. [1]: ▶ this video [2]: link [3]: link [4]: link [5]: link

Not necessarily solved, and I assume you know about it, but for anyone reading this, elm-ui is definitely worth checking out for at least an exploration of an alternative to CSS. For a talk about this: ▶ this video

Given my thoughts (and recent experience) was shaped by something like Elm-UI - see: ▶ this video If you have the time to learn CSS, you have the time to learn anything else. ;)