According to the last annual "State of CSS" survey, the majority of CSS-in-JS tools experienced a massive drop in retention amongst developers in 2023.

While tools like Styled Components and Stitches saw a rise in usage during 2021 and 2022, the latest 2023 report paints a different story. There is a significant drop of 11% for "Styled Components" and 21% for "Stitches". Likewise, others like "Emotion" and "Vanilla Extract" fell by 4.5% and 5%.

Yet, alternatives approaches such as CSS Modules (amongst others) have been holding steady with mere variation of less than 1% annually since the start of the survey in 2019.

This talk attempts to make sense of this decline and understand the implications for those currently using (or considering the usage of) modern CSS-in-JS tools. It presents the speaker's own understanding of the landscape, as well as summaries of recorded interviews with a range of South African developers whom have been using CSS-in-JS for several years.