Is it normal to have tens of CSS files impacting a component!? In my world, the component styles itself, and its parent can tell it how to be spaced / positioned and themed (via CSS variables preferably). Anything beyond that seems spaghetti...
Of course it's the worst kind of rotten spaghetti. But yes, this is normal when projects are 10 years old, super large, and have been touched by 200, 300 or more developers.
There's only two ways to avoid it: having very small, very cohesive, teams, or using tools and methodologies that avoid this.
I've mainly seen this happen when the site/application is very product/design (non-tech) driven and the developers pull themselves and the code into contortions to deliver very exacting requirements. The goal is to deliver a pixel-perfect result at the end of the sprint, and the unfortunate waste product is the mess of CSS, markup and JS required to deliver it: which then becomes very fragile technical debt that can only be tweaked rather than refactored lest the whole stack of cards collapses. It makes little difference whether the team started out with a UI framework or not at this point.
Fair enough, I work in small teams and independently a lot. It does make sense you need some strict architecture / tooling to prevent it in a more distributed org.
This is one of those things that gives me the feeling the true "10x" engineer mostly just writes code to some reasonable architecture standard and does their best to avoid tech debt. Speed in the longer term means avoiding these situations if you ask me
