Formidable employee here: To be quite honest we are compensated very fairly for our industry already and this program is not meant to ‘provide a living wage’ by any means.
Instead, this is a ‘fair nod’ at the work some of us feel compelled and motivated to do after work hours.
Not saying your perspective is wrong, just hopefully providing a bit more context about what this program means for someone who uses it.
I'm a true designer/FE developer hybrid - I love designing and prototyping with sketch/framer/invision, and then developing frontend components & building single-page apps. I've build simple RESTful APIs for personal projects that include oauth/sql/qless services. I care a lot about UX & perf, and really want to work on an exciting product.
Its not horribly broken, IE11/10 is well supported with prefixes & past flexbox-spec properties. Autoprefixer does all the work there. For IE9/8 you could rely on polyfills like https://github.com/10up/flexibility
Listened to @_lemonmade & @snookca at a recent conference talk about how they're using Flexbox across the Shopify platform and there is no reason why other far-reaching platforms shouldn't make the switch today.
It works in some cases as a pattern of keeping components very modular and only loading the styles on the page that a single component needs. And I think it works well in cases where a component is very unique and wouldn't share any styles with other components.
That said, I personally see it as an anti-pattern. Styles should be kept agnostic of application logic for the most part. Practicing proper BEM convention paired with proper organization of SASS files yields simple management of style logic. This works exceptionally well in complex applications.
There are two camps forming right now with different methodologies & use-cases in each, and it will be interesting to see which patterns are implemented & what kind of 'css in js' tools become available.
A quick google search on the matter will reveal many sources. Though not the most professional news syndicate, VICE ran a great story a few months ago on the environmental impacts of palm oil in Indonesia.
AFAIK This script came from Tympanus/Codrops, not VI. I've used a version of this script as well for a project. I mean, it'd be better if Marek used even a modified background instead of taking the entire example from Codrops, but I don't think it would be 'stealing' as much as reusing tutorial code.
Instead, this is a ‘fair nod’ at the work some of us feel compelled and motivated to do after work hours.
Not saying your perspective is wrong, just hopefully providing a bit more context about what this program means for someone who uses it.