The tools have started having opinions, and I am still working out how I feel about it.
Frameworks are everywhere now. You reach for one and a good deal of the thinking has already been done for you. The grid is decided. The breakpoints are decided. The buttons arrive with a shape you did not choose. You can build faster than you ever have.
The gift is real. Things that used to take a fortnight take an afternoon, and the fiddly cross-browser misery that ate whole years of my life is largely solved now by somebody I will never meet. I am not going to romanticise the old suffering. It was not noble. It was just slow.
But an opinionated tool is one that has made choices on your behalf, and if you never notice the choices, you have quietly handed your taste over to a default. You start to see it when everything begins to look the same. Not because designers agreed on anything, but because they all reached for the same starting point and left it where it was.
So a small rule is forming for me. Use the framework. Then go and change the two or three things that make it obvious you used it. If I cannot say what those things are, I probably do not understand the tool yet. I am only operating it, and I would rather understand it.
Speed and defaults are not the same thing, though they arrive together and are easy to confuse. That is the part I am still sitting with. I think a lot of us are going to learn the difference slowly, myself included.