To be honest, CSS had the cascade but also had horrible tools for actually managing the cascade for a long time.

If CSS had nesting, variables, media queries, the other nice selector queries like :has, and modules out of the gate, we likely would have not needed much of the tooling like tailwind that eventually got built to manage it all with less boilerplate. We built the tools because even when these features rolled out they came in fits and starts so you couldn’t adopt it without polyfills and whatnot.