I have been using CSS since 1996, in IE 3 and later in Netscape 4. I know all of the basics. I understand the cascade. I can make CSS tap dance with files ½ to ⅓ the size of what most people build. As a result, IMO preprocessors are cognitive crutches for those who don’t understand the cascade, and the obscenely bloated files they produce are materially harmful to first-load rendering performance.

That’s my background and position, as an orientation point to work from.

But I have been out of the game - building software for the desktop - for a little over a half decade now, and thanks to life events I haven't really had the spare time to keep up and truly play with things. I have been seeing some dramatic improvements with CSS and some really nifty and fun features, and I’m hoping that there is a reference for those new features that doesn’t also involve a slog through the basics or hand-holding for those just gearing up (no shade being thrown, I just don’t need hand-holding).

Essentially something high-level, that covers the high notes and any known gotchas for additions over the last little while. Ideally something that expects the user to already be well-versed in the first two decades of CSS development, and covers everything that has arisen recently. The “in a nutshell” books comes to mind, but even a tabular cheat-sheet style reference covering the better part of the last decade would be a great starting point.

Asking here, as Google has become a right potato as of late. The results it is coming back with are… distinctly suboptimal regardless of the terms I use. It’s yeeting resources at me that are appropriate for a junior dev, which is not what I am looking for. And I have always found official resources - such as the W3C - to be exceedingly dry; great for debating a technical point, not so much for learning from.