I’ve been structuring my styles with CUBE.css (https://cube.fyi) for a few months now and a classless approach fits the composition piece very well.
Example: In a particular context (say the <h3> tag in the <header> of each <section>) I almost always want a default style. On changing that style, I don’t want to modify markup. In future, when adding more pages, I don’t want to remember the particular combination of css classes that I’ve used elsewhere. When a particular face out is different (this <article> is a modal) then I can add meaningful class names to convey intentions.
From a practical perspective, I’ve found it to give me 90% of the UI I want at 10% of the cost.
OT: Do you by chance have any pointers on where to stay up-to-date on modern frontend development?
As a dev I've been out of the frontend game for a few years, when BEM was widely used. When I started working more on frontend again a few months ago I tried to look around for developments in terms of methodologies (e.g. "is there a 'next BEM'?"), but didn't really find anything and didn't even know where to look. Even just hearing about newer aproaches like CUBE would be nice, regardless if they end up being fit for production usage.
I'm not sure what other advice to give. A lot of this was collected over time in response to frustrations I felt around the direction front-end has been moving in (css-in-js, atomic css etc.) and looking for people writing criticisms of it.
It keeps the HTML about as clean as it can be, more often than not. Many of these classless CSS frameworks you can substitute arbitrarily without ever changing the markup. Which can be very useful for small static sites with hand-edited HTML like the Old Web people used to bake.
I certainly appreciate that "Old Web" feeling from the time before CSS when Browser default/built-in stylesheets were more opinionated and tried to do nice things without forcing you to do all of your styling by hand. Classless frameworks can feel like a good throwback to that era, and a useful compromise from today's browsers' awful default styles and the sorts of CSS frameworks that include everything and a kitchen sink and are designed much more for "apps" than just a clean document full of information.
Why the demand for "classless"?