We are using too much CSS

I try hard not to nitpick various websites and projects to death, though it doesn't work very often and I end up instead trying to forget that I was trying not to nitpick (like we all do), but I've noticed a painful trend in the modern web:

We're using too much CSS.

Most of the sites I find are a caustic mess of colors, fonts, sizes, hierarchy, sidebars, advertisements, titles, and everything else that can get in the way of reading the content. I totally understand why they do it: They want you to get lost in the ads and click the pages to load more ads, so they can get the most ad views possible before you leave the ads but - oh wait - have you signed up to our ad newsletter once your ad mouse leaves the ad window? That, and the fact that Google ranks (used to rank? still ranks?) based on "time on site", has led to an advertising arms race to keep you hooked into the site as long as possible.

For those, I have nothing but sad disappointment at the current state of affairs. But for everyone else who has to look around and see what everyone else is doing before they sit down and design a site on their own, there's still hope. So here's what you do:

You don't need 500 lines of transition styles with custom keyframes and fifteen compiled LESS files for people to read your content. What you need is content. People don't read your stylesheet or pore over your event handlers (unless they're on CodePen...), they come to consume the media you've created for them.

"But it's only 172Kb minified", you say. Yeah? And it could take ten seconds to understand. We've gone too far down the clever frameworks rabbit hole. It's time to stop.

That's not to say you shouldn't use any styles at all, but a few, well-placed styles can make your content look great.

In honor of @jensimmons "newwwyear" idea, maybe it's time you threw out all of those libraries and stylesheets to try something new. Something with less CSS.