i appreciate you contributing your experience on this. to be more specific, it looks to me like a lot of the css variables are too granular, likely because they're being generated via scss functions, and so must conform to a set of algorithmic conventions. but a lot of the time, you don't want to tweak just the default border color of the card component separate from its border width separate from the border color of a generic container (or whatever). i haven't delved deep enough to know precisely how this all plays out, but that's what it looks like to me on first perusal.

bootstrap does this as well, and since tabler is built on bootstrap, it seems they're extending that precedent (there's a lot of "!important" going on to, which is not a good sign). i'll admit i'm not much of a bootstrap fan either.

i'm slowly developing my own personal css framework where i'm trying to have no tooling at all, including no scss, and very, very minimal js (and certainly no framework or packaging/transpiling of js at all) by default. it leans heavily on css variables and all the other current css goodies (good riddens IE!). that way, it can fit into any use case without having to worry about tooling conflicts. bulma kinda takes this approach (particularly, no js), but it's weirdly not as extensive as i'd expected it to be.