Can an argument be bade that CSS only exists becuase javascript failed to develop a styling component to displace it?

I like to think webassembly is the right track. But ECMAScript and CSS alike need(ed) to devolve into a simpler byte-code like intermediary language syntax.

Browsers supporting complex languages has always been a bad idea, what they need to support is capabilities, and access and security primitives. wasm hasn't displaced javascript, because afaik, the wasm spec for browsers doesn't require them to implement javascript (and ideally, CSS) via wasm.

Instead of distilling, simplifying and speccing CSS and Javascript, browsers caked on layers upon layers of complicated features. The idea that browsers should define and regulate the languages developers use to write front-end code needs to die.

It relies on a few things, but @functions, if() statements, and container style queries are the main ones.

I do actually have a CSS CVE[0] in Chrome, but it was in the changelog as "in Animation" instead of "in CSS", so no fun stories/headlines for me :c

[0] https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/2025/06/stable-channel...

Not really, Internet Explorer was single platform and closed source.

I'd argue that it's the non-Chrome browsers holding the web back nowadays. Realistically, Firefox and Safari exist to just hold back web standards and eventually implement features Chrome had yesterday.