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The Problem
Every team inherits a stylesheet like this eventually.
Not badly written. Nobody on the original team was careless. Selectors are reasonable. Naming is consistent enough. And still, nobody touches it without dread, because nobody's sure which of its four thousand lines are load-bearing.
So the instinct is always the same. Add a new rule. Don't remove the old one — just in case. A new component gets its own selector rather than reusing something that might, somehow, be relied on elsewhere in ways nobody documented. The file grows. It never shrinks. Not because anyone decided it should only grow — because growing felt safe, and shrinking never did.






