Sass, Pug, Haml, Slim, Stylus, and their friends all aim to make writing various bits of your frontend easier. And they mostly deliver on this primary promise. But they are all victims to the vagaries of open software development, and seem to have mostly fallen by the wayside. I loved using these through my career, so its with a bit of sadness that I realized I don't want to use them for new projects.
CSS has been growing a lot of “super powers” lately, that used to require a pre-processor. Custom properties (variables), nesting,
calc, andcolor-mixused to be things we’d reach for a preprocessor for, but can now be done 100% in pure CSS. And generally, the CSS based versions are better than their old preprocessor counterparts.calccan mix units, so you can easily do things likecalc(100% - 1rem)to subtract a rem from 100% of the parent container. Can’t do that in Sass. Custom properties can be set by Javascript, or by media queries, and follow CSS scoping rules. Thats how I handle light/dark mode on my site.