I understand how software can get out of control and bloated. I've done it myself, hate to admit it.
In writing my CSS Framework, I started with a module for a responsive 12 column grid system. At the point where I felt comfortable to use it in a pre-production environment, it was 7Kb in size. I was quite satisfied with it at that point. The functionality was excellent. I had to overcome a few obstacles along the way. It turned out the obstacle was a known issue. The flexbox "gap" (column-gap, in particular) did not work as expected when the flex-wrap directive was set to "wrap". It only worked as expected when flex-wrap was set to "nowrap".
The latest release of the Flexbox specification was in 2018. Over 4 years ago. And that issue remains unfixed. I have since discovered another anomaly with the column-gap functionality.
I came up with a work around. My solution is based on using padding and margins to achieve a pseudo gutter (or gap) effect. The work around did end up "bloating" my code file size, but I justified that since it was still considerably smaller than the previous CSS Frameworks I used.
Going through the pre-production process, I built several sites and ran into more obstacles with the Flexbox code and my work arounds. What started out as a 7Kb work-around ended up at 14Kb as a release candidate for production.
And, then, a killer problem. I won't go into how the problem manifests. I will say, though, that I started over completely with a re-write of an entirely new 12-column flexbox-based grid. It works in both wrap and nowrap modes. It supports spacing horizontally and vertically ... in essentially the same way the column-gap and row-gap is supposed to work.
And, it is just 11Kb. Let that sink in, 11Kb. A fully responsive 12-column grid – 11Kb. That's a flexbox grid system. All columns are fully balanced, meaning they will stretch to fill the available space of the tallest column. I also built a fully responsive 12-column CSS Grid. It even has offsets, although they work slightlty different than the Flexbox grid offsets. And the CSS Grid file size is just 7Kb.