Originally on Medium.com as a reply to CSS: In defense of !important – Calidae Blog.
Debugging custom properties & calc() functions are not the best DX (Developer experience), yet. One way is to enforce good coding practices to help avoid issues. One of those reasons - is enforcing immutability.
Please read the article and let me know if you see more benefits that I might have overlooked!
Top comments (1)
Treating primitive custom properties as immutable is crucial for scaling any UI architecture. When developers redefine base tokens inside a local scope, the cascade becomes an absolute nightmare to track down. The biggest hidden benefit here is total predictability across context shifts. If a variable only flows one way and never gets overwritten downstream, the browser devtools instantly point to a single source of truth instead of a tangled web of overrides.