The article also misses that “JS imports” (script tags with type module) act as though they have the defer attribute by default, so they are not “render blocking” like CSS imports are. It is good that CSS always blocks the parser though to prevent flash of unstyled content. My main issue with CSS imports though is that they don’t encapsulate the style rules at all, which doesn’t give much advantage over inlining the CSS to avoid the extra network request.
However I do agree with the sentiment of the article that CSS did a pretty good job of enabling a huge amount of change in web design over the years despite the lack of good options for layout in the early days