Sass, Pug, Haml, Slim, Stylus, and their friends all aim to make writing various bits of your frontend easier. And they mostly deliver on this primary promise. But they are all victims to the vagaries of open software development, and seem to have mostly fallen by the wayside. I loved using these through my career, so its with a bit of sadness that I realized I don't want to use them for new projects.
It used to be pretty meaningful when autocomplete was not as powerful as it is today. Only very serious emacs users could achieve fast and flexible static completion before LSP forced everyone to step up their game.
Now that everybody and their grandparents have LSP available (or even more powerful tools if you’re using Very Professional IDEs), it’s not nearly as much of an issue, just hit tab and never type close brackets again.
It’s not that folks are averse to writing code, it’s more-so averse to actually typing out a shitton of boilerplate and feeling the slog until you actually get to the juicy bits where you have to think.