Speaking as someone who builds massive web projects for a billion dollar company, I can state that nothing you describe is necessary if you document your work, maintain standards, and have recurring maintenance events.
CSS maintenance is not hard. It's just boring.
You wanted a fun website but what you got is a dependency manager with a production CI/CD pipeline taking 15 min to check that yes, the sentence you wrote can in fact be written.
Package managers work, but isn't there some middle ground that doesn't involve depending on a runtime that itself is continuously updated ?
The existance of other methods doesn't preclude you from doing it whatever way you want to. The CSS file is right there on github to download https://github.com/micah5/PSone.css/blob/master/PSone.css
You could use the upstream URL, but that'd be a privacy issue.
You could proxy the upstream file, but that rules out static serving.
Maybe use a Makefile that fetches the last version and uses it ?
That would be a package manager lol.
You don't, because you're rendering a simple html page, and whatever minor changes are in the new version are largely irrelevant.
Unfortunately, this is the state of much of software development today. It's why most webpages are enormous. It's why massive increases to speed, processing power, and communication bandwidth have resulted in no real net increase to web-browsing speed for the last 10 years.
It's why massive increases to speed, processing power,
and communication bandwidth have resulted in no real
net increase to web-browsing speed for the last 10 years.
There are clearly cases where complex build/CI/CD pipelines make sense, but people now believe they need big enterprisey FAANG-scale solutions even when they don't.
jsDelivr is pretty nimble in the regard. It mirrors GitHub and npm (and caches and (optionally) minifies the result) so depending on the project, you can get a specific release, or just pull from the master branch, by simply changing the URL of the CSS file.