The part about feeling like you'd been digging a hole with a spoon got me good, because I did the exact same thing with flexbox for way too long. I spent hours nudging margins and padding to center stuff, then one day someone showed me justify-content and align-items and I just sat there staring at my screen. All those nights of adding random empty divs like some kind of ritual sacrifice to the layout gods, and the answer was two lines the whole time. My worst one though was box-shadow. I built fake shadows with border tricks and gradients for years before I realized you could just, you know, use the box-shadow property. Forty divs for a sunset is rough but honestly it could've been forty-seven like your 2019 self, so at least you upgraded.

Man, orange and brown always screamed 70s basement until I saw it on a sunset mural.