That's sad to hear. Good CSS with an intuitive DOM structure is simple to achieve yet so powerful. Hate to see devs give up that power.

Complex solutions are much, much easier than simple solutions.

Exactly this. Anyone who has worked with a junior developer understands this intuitively. They spend a week smashing their head against the desk figuring something out, then in review, you (the senior dev) can look at it for 30 seconds and see all the holes they missed and think of a simpler solution that uses 1/3 the amount of code.

Simplicity is a skill and it's hard to do. There's a reason most people are not minimalists despite the almost universal western desire to "have less stuff".