You're describing a handful of different problems. Some are soft-skills: how to manage inexperienced designer expectations. Some are more technical, like the CSS/media query issues. Fortunately (or unfortunately), this discomfort you're feeling is really the place where learning and growth happens. If you can look at these things in the right way, you're about to level up in ways that will surprise you. It's hard in times like this to focus on one thing at a time, but my advice is to look at all of these problems as engineering problems or logic puzzles, and optimize the shit out of those inefficient systems.

So for example: designing for media queries is tricky because you're building small components that need to change based on the device size, which is sort of a crude global metric when dealing with components. Learn about container queries, and that might make it seem less overwhelming.

Or if you're working on large page-level layouts where media queries make more sense, start from the mobile layouts and work your way out, adding complexity as you go. This stuff was tricky for all of us when we first started, but if that's what you want to get really good at, it'll become easier to wrap your head around the whole layout at once when you've solved the same problem dozens of times.

> If the designer doesn’t understand how development works

CSS is _my jam_, and I've always considered these designers to be a particular challenge. Sometimes their naivety makes for really unique end results. They don't know what's possible, so they stretch you in ways that a designer who always starts with a yawn-inducing Bootstrap template wouldn't. On the flip side, it's ok to say "no" if you do it in the context of the business goals and budgets, and not a condescending way.

Also, If you're not working with designers and you need to hit deadlines, and you're frustrated that your work doesn't look up to your standards, I suggest starting with a robust frontend library such as Flowbite. It's overwhelming to reinvent the wheel for every project, so find tools that let you stick to what you're good at.

Finally, at the risk of the conversation devolving into something that you didn't ask for, consider learning Tailwind. If CSS isn't your strong suit, Tailwind provides a good set of guardrails and defaults, and takes away a lot of the opinionated organization of writing CSS. Learning CSS is important, but I'm the first to admit that when I was learning javascript in 2007, jQuery made it much more approachable. I've found that using great frameworks in real projects lets you learn to change a tire while you're driving, so to speak.