I totally agree with your assessment. CSS has been seen in all of my jobs as an "also do this" for general backend developers and not an area of focus. But we have an agency team at our company with a specialized FED and I would pay many real gold bars to be able to pass my designs to someone like her on the product team. In addition to 'looking down', visual FED usually comes near the end of a feature's development cycle, so there's also a rush to get it done and passed on to QA. Even when I do the CSS as the designer, I get subtle time pressure cues while working on it (wait the feature is DONE why is it in this weird middle phase for so long??). For a while it was a thing at one of my jobs to make a feature look so ugly I would have to style it. That went on until a couple of those implementations made it into production.
Front-end has been a constant source of indecision for me in my career. With front-end JS app frameworks becoming more and more complex, I'm finding it harder and harder to maintain understanding in my head of how my HTML/CSS fits into an application. But I also can't just pass things off because I know there are things about my design that I'm going to want to edit once it's all in motion. Additionally, I see being able to build at least static websites as a powerful tool to help me bring ideas to life, and there continues to be exciting additions to CSS that make it easier to make those amazing experiences. I'm constantly switching between the poles of I don't want to touch code ever" and "oh my god look at that cool thing I can do with the Internet!"
I totally agree with your assessment. CSS has been seen in all of my jobs as an "also do this" for general backend developers and not an area of focus. But we have an agency team at our company with a specialized FED and I would pay many real gold bars to be able to pass my designs to someone like her on the product team. In addition to 'looking down', visual FED usually comes near the end of a feature's development cycle, so there's also a rush to get it done and passed on to QA. Even when I do the CSS as the designer, I get subtle time pressure cues while working on it (wait the feature is DONE why is it in this weird middle phase for so long??). For a while it was a thing at one of my jobs to make a feature look so ugly I would have to style it. That went on until a couple of those implementations made it into production.
Front-end has been a constant source of indecision for me in my career. With front-end JS app frameworks becoming more and more complex, I'm finding it harder and harder to maintain understanding in my head of how my HTML/CSS fits into an application. But I also can't just pass things off because I know there are things about my design that I'm going to want to edit once it's all in motion. Additionally, I see being able to build at least static websites as a powerful tool to help me bring ideas to life, and there continues to be exciting additions to CSS that make it easier to make those amazing experiences. I'm constantly switching between the poles of I don't want to touch code ever" and "oh my god look at that cool thing I can do with the Internet!"