considering people rarely make meta posts about how great their question was received, it's pretty expected that it'd be net negative.

From a practical point of view it's highly desirable to specify them to prevent page reflows as mentioned above. However those suggesting it should be in the html because of this are missing the fact browsers use css when building the page initially. If they didn't the page would have to be redrawn for floated elements, specified padding, margins etc.

A product’s onceability is, to a certain extent, linked to its usefulness. If it is really useful, we will certainly go to considerable lengths to repair it.

debt ... which is not a straight bad thing but something that could provide some "short term financing" get us to survive the project (how many of us could afford to buy a house without taking out the mortgage?).

My experience is that components count increase very fast in Svelte, much faster than in Ractive.

reading a thesaurus is pretty much a bad way to improve any writing skill