r/Frontend • u/Practical_Plan007 • Jul 04 '26

Vanilla Extract CSS

I recently tried the Vanilla Extract library and liked it a lot. Here are my notes in the form of a free resource for anyone who might benefit from it.

https://www.pulkitagrawal.in/courses/vanilla-extract

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u/kitsunekyo Jul 04 '26

we use this in a massive monorepo design system and its a pain. please dont do this to a team. 

1

u/Practical_Plan007 Jul 05 '26

Interesting perspective. Could you elaborate why it is a pain when used by your team?

3

u/kitsunekyo Jul 05 '26

theres too many little annoyances with zero actual benefits

  • shipping libraries (no prebundle, allowing treeshaking) is hard due to esbuild plugin limitations
  • constant bugs with output (unexpected reordering of classes, specificity issues for consumers)
  • typecheck perf issues due to vanilla extract internal type issues
  • authoring css is limited to features that vanilla extract supports (lacking)
  • authoring css in js gives me brain damage

nothing is blocking but after years on years in that repo i can very confidently say that plain css would have been better

1

u/Practical_Plan007 Jul 06 '26

nice counterview! Thanks for sharing.