PurgeCSS and HTTP/2 Means CSS Bloat is Dead

When I started doing Rails performance work in 2016, one common scenario played out at client after client. The app, which was probably 3-5 years old, suffered from poor frontend performance partly because it required 300kb-500kb of CSS on initial load. This CSS file had slowly grown in size over the years until it became a massive, terrible, awful hairball of a mess!CSS is an important resource to keep under control in terms of size because of the extremely important place it occupies during a page render. It's usually the first thing we end up downloading, meaning that it's filesize impacts bandwidth consumption during a pretty important period (right after the HTML has downloaded, but before the page has rendered).