IMO this is a symptom of a larger problem with the entire web 'ecosystem' (HTML, CSS, JS primarily). It all tries (or tried, anyway) to be simple and easy and forgiving - which means that simple things are easy, and moderately complex things are insanely difficult.
I honestly think the only real solution is re-doing all of it 'from scratch', to make everything (a) stricter and (b) more normal/consistent.
(I think the extant transpilers/preprocessors tend to try to be too 'thin' of a wrapper around CSS/JS: they do give some nice quality of life features but still don't really clean up the mess that is JS and the DOM.)
I honestly think the only real solution is re-doing all of it 'from scratch', to make everything (a) stricter and (b) more normal/consistent.
(I think the extant transpilers/preprocessors tend to try to be too 'thin' of a wrapper around CSS/JS: they do give some nice quality of life features but still don't really clean up the mess that is JS and the DOM.)