You can try to reduce the horribleness of a CSS file, but the language simply doesn't provide the tools needed to do the one thing all programmers need to manage complexity: abstract away the common part of two specific processes into a reusable component.
I'll never forgive the designers of CSS for not at least providing immutable constants, if not variables.
Not that plenty about CSS doesn't beg for better abstractions, but turning it into a programming language is kind of a terrifying prospect. I've see too much of what enthusiastic amateurs can inflict with JavaScript.
So what if CSS doesn't have variables? We can add them. CSS is the format it has to reach the browser in, it's not the format we have to write in though. There are multiple projects out there for writing CSS at a higher level, which "compile" to CSS but let you use variables and things like that.