Not sure about your particular situation but there’s also the possibility that the bad CSS was good CSS when it was written and over time that got superseded by advancements in both technology and practice.
Or simply different styles and/or skill levels were mixed. I’m currently sifting through a code base that I know for a fact started out goodish, but through multiple team reorgs and lax standards/tight deadlines it devolved into a hot mess. A major contributor being that most of the devs were inexperienced in the framework and just did what they thought was right.
Even supposedly senior devs often have a “I know best” mentality and when they get their hands on a code base do it their way, with the result that after something went through a couple of hands you have a mess of different coding styles and even different software design choices in the same code base, or in other words, and unmaintainable mess.
Not sure about your particular situation but there’s also the possibility that the bad CSS was good CSS when it was written and over time that got superseded by advancements in both technology and practice.
Or simply different styles and/or skill levels were mixed. I’m currently sifting through a code base that I know for a fact started out goodish, but through multiple team reorgs and lax standards/tight deadlines it devolved into a hot mess. A major contributor being that most of the devs were inexperienced in the framework and just did what they thought was right.
Even supposedly senior devs often have a “I know best” mentality and when they get their hands on a code base do it their way, with the result that after something went through a couple of hands you have a mess of different coding styles and even different software design choices in the same code base, or in other words, and unmaintainable mess.