I prefer making the template myself, but coding from scratch is not for everyone. Bootstrap is useful then depending on project, and what you can tolerate in terms of code bloat and bag of tricks bloat.
I pass the template I make along to the next project, and improve the template as I go. By using frameworks you're hand-balling the task of "making it better" to someone else. As for css grid, not using it yet due to my wanting to support older browsers, but I am now enjoying flexbox for page structure after ignoring it for a long time. Flexbox is a great set of tricks.
"By using frameworks you're hand-balling the task of "making it better" to someone else"
You sound a bit ambivalent about whether this is a good thing or not.
I would guess most hand-rolled alternatives don't have a long list of well documented browser bugs they couldn't work around and don't have half the workarounds for things they could handle. Instead they'll just silently break since they don't have the QA exposure across obscure platforms that Bootstrap does as a massively popular open source project:
I would guess Grid has just as many issues, and would guess that Bootstrap will adopt it at roughly the time it becomes supported by a wide range of browsers, and will have implemented and tested workarounds for any lingering issues with it.
Bootstrap seems to tickle the same "I could write Dropbox over a weekend" response that Hacker News commenters are famous for, just from those with a slightly different technical skill set.
Until Bootstrap adopts CSS Grid (v5?) I'd love to hear stories about folks using CSS Grid and Bootstrap components/typography/styling (i.e. everything other than Bootstrap's grid) together.
My opinion is that CSS bloat is way more harmful than bloat in any other language. I do indeed prefer to start from a blank state every time, or take a small template and eagerly cut everything that is not immediately useful out of it.
That said, I see the value of a CSS "library" for a large team that has to agree on both a template and terminology.
I pass the template I make along to the next project, and improve the template as I go. By using frameworks you're hand-balling the task of "making it better" to someone else. As for css grid, not using it yet due to my wanting to support older browsers, but I am now enjoying flexbox for page structure after ignoring it for a long time. Flexbox is a great set of tricks.