Design engineers still exist, they just write more JS these days. They are still building UI and design systems and teaching craft & supporting full stack teams. The craft is there, but the tools are different.

True — they just need to be more engineers than designers.

I don’t think putting html in one file and css in another file makes you more or less of a designer than putting both html and css into a single file.

I think the approach is different. Component style applications have to thing about all component presentation separately, web apps ressemble apps more than documents (d’uh) so it makes sense that they are designed as such.

Documents are designed holistically, you don’t care that much about how a thing (say, an image that is an aside) would look on the next page because on the next page there would be something completely different.

I think much of the debate and contention comes from the fact that many developers only worked on either web apps, or documents (e.g.: static blog, cms) and each try to convince the other group that their approach is the best.

Switching from CSS based design systems to large TypeScript monoliths requires you to learn one or two things about engineering